Author: Roberta Grimes

Hatred

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.
He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored.
He hath loosed the fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword!
His truth is marching on.
Glory, Glory, hallelujah! Glory, glory, hallelujah!
Glory, glory, hallelujah! His truth is marching on.

 I have seen Him in the watch-fires of a hundred circling camps.
They have builded Him an altar in the evening dews and damps.
I can read His righteous sentence by the dim and flaring lamps.
His day is marching on.
Glory, glory, hallelujah! Glory, glory, hallelujah!
Glory, glory, hallelujah! His day is marching on.
– Julia Ward Howe (1819-1910) & John William Steffe (1830-1890), from “Battle Hymn of the Republic” (1862).

My beloved Thomas and I are still trying to figure out which one of us has won our bet of last week, or even if in fact there ever was a bet that was formally entered between us. Thomas thought it was important that we write a blog post about the flat-out, beyond-amazing moment when God intervened just as someone tried to assassinate one of the American presidential candidates. Thomas wanted to use that horrifying incident as a teaching moment about some of the very rare times when God actually does in fact play an active role in human events, and he wanted to talk about why and how God might ever want to intervene. Thomas was pretty pumped about our using God’s saving of Donald Trump’s life as a teaching moment. But I, on the contrary, was sure that if we wrote about that when things in this country are at such a fever pitch of negativity as they are right now, all that we were going to get would be a whole lot of vitriol thrown at us. No one was going to want to learn from that event anything nuanced about how God might work in the world.

So, who was right? I think that I was more right in this case than he was. Actually, those commenters who read our blog post last week before commenting did try to do what we had requested, and they viewed this as an exercise in better understanding how God sometimes works in the world, rather than just voicing their personal animosity for the candidate who had been shot and only wounded. And we do so very much appreciate those honest commenters who spoke so wisely and so well! There were other people, though, who ferreted out even from a distance the possibility that here was yet another spot where they might have a chance to voice their hatred for Donald Trump, and they attempted to pile on and do that. Fortunately, I get to approve first-time commenters, so I spared you all their loathsome bile. And as I was doing that, Thomas said, “Well, we’ve got a great topic for next week’s blog post, if nothing else.”

Wow, was he ever right about that! I don’t think that we ever have talked about hatred as a blog topic here, not once in our more than ten years of writing these weekly posts. How can we have missed such an obvious topic? Hatred is both sadly almost universal and currently highly topical. It is something that those who fall victim to it tend so often to see as even actually a virtue. Surely some of those who were in the grips of hatred and commented on our post of last week felt virtuous about their hatred. Which fact astonished me.

I was about to begin by telling you that hatred is useless, and then to go on and tell you how spiritually damaging hatred is to the hater. But no, there is indeed one situation in which hatred can be useful, so let’s first just mention that. The only situation in which hatred can be useful is in the case of an all-out war meant to end in the civilizational death of one set of combatants. Yes, I will indeed cede to you that point. So that is the topic of our frame-verse today, and a lovely frame-verse it is indeed, even if we all hope that we never will have to sing it! Killing another human being is not a natural thing, so if you have to go to war for real, then by all means, gin up in yourself some hatred so you can become a sure-enough killer. But is there an all-out war at that level going on for you at this moment? No? Then no one has any justification for hating anyone else, nor for assuming that God hates anyone at all!

 Never having talked about nor written about hatred, I am not sure how even to begin to write about it now. In fact, in peacetime there is nothing that is good or useful about hatred on any level. Not for the hater, not for the one being hated, and not for the world at large. So, let’s begin there:

  • What we experience as human consciousness is the only thing that actually exists. All the rest of what seems to exist is imagined by our minds. Our minds are all part of that one great scale of human consciousness, and like all forms of energy, consciousness vibrates. Its vibration is in the key of human emotion, so at its highest vibration, consciousness vibrates as perfect love; while at its lowest emotion, consciousness vibrates as seething hatred, rage, and terror. Consciousness is what we are.
  • The reason why we choose to be born on earth is so we can learn how to raise our own consciousness vibration more firmly toward love. There are a few other reasons, but for nearly all of us, that is pretty much the sole reason why we are here. We are going through all that we go through on earth as exercises to move ourselves away from all the lowest and ishiest emotions, and ever closer to ever more perfect love. So, if rather than zealously doing all that we can to raise our personal consciousness vibration toward ever more perfect love, we are instead encouraging in ourselves ever more hatred and anger toward, say, certain politicians or other public figures who aren’t even directly in our own lives, we will be severely lowering our personal consciousness vibration, rather than raising it. And that can result in our complete waste of this entire lifetime!
  • The people that we hate in public life don’t care that we hate them. Sadly, politicians assume that being hated by a certain number of people goes with the territory, and they really don’t care. Your hatred and rage doesn’t harm them at all. There you are, seething with your mighty rage at Biden or Kamala or Trump, or indeed at whomever you might have decided is worth your spending all your rage and hate on this person, your bile, your sour stomach acid and your poor head aching; and the object of all your rage will just go happily on, perhaps even hitting a hole-in-one at the seventh hole. He or she neither knows nor cares how you feel.
  • Hating even one person, no matter how justified your hatred in that single case might feel to you, establishes in your mind a pathway for a hatred habit that makes your future hatreds of individual people, and then of groups of people, very much easier. And it forever destroys your personal peace. As more and more negative energy accumulates in your mind, you also are looking more closely at each new person that you meet, and even at each new person that you see, to determine whether this is someone else that you feel is worthy of your hatred. I kid you not! This is really what happens. Not to Donald Trump or Kamala, of course. It is what happens to you, if you allow yourself to actively hate even one person.

We in the northern American states watched in amazement during the nineteen-fifties and -sixties as the schools in some of our southeastern states had to be racially integrated by armed police. And all because some light-skinned American southerners had taught themselves over time to hate dark-skinned people. Do you see how this works? Once hatred gains a foothold in people’s minds, it is incredibly so easily self-reinforcing. And it ends altogether even the possibility of any spiritual growth in those who espouse it, which is why some southern churches even to this day are sadly full of whole congregations that are oddly insular and permanently angry.

Ginned-up hatred of an opposition leader is sometimes used by politicians as a tool to rile up their bases. It is now being used pretty forcefully by some Democrats against Mr. Trump, probably because, as I remarked last week, I think it is easy to see Trump as a highly distasteful public figure. He has a huge ego, he makes up nasty names for people, he insists on always being right, he loves to show off his wealth, and he was a big womanizer when he was young: what is there not to dislike about this man? But you cannot give in to the temptation to hate Donald Trump without risking the complete destruction of your own spiritual progress for this lifetime. For my own part, I have successfully resisted the temptation to hate him by looking at his children, all of whom seem by every account to be happy and successful drug- and vice-free adults who all remain close to and idolize their father. There must be something good in Donald Trump, because a loving fatherhood of five adult children when three mothers are involved is a difficult trick to pull off, and it does not happen by chance. I also consider the fact that Trump’s presidential term was much better for his country than was Joe Biden’s term that followed it, from the Abraham Accords and no foreign wars to a decent economy with low inflation and a surplus of oil right down to the efficiently closed southern border. I also have received a couple of emails during this past week from people who told me about some surprising private kindnesses from Donald Trump that he never has wanted to make public. So I focus on just these good things. I ignore the things that I always have disliked about the man.

What does our beloved Jesus say about hate? He says very little, actually. “Hate” is such a strongly negative word that Jesus seldom uses it. But only consider this string of statements in the Gospel of John that comes toward the end of the Lord’s earthly life as He is preparing His disciples to go out into the world and teach the Lord’s Way:

“For everyone who does evil hates the Light, and does not come to the Light for fear that his deeds will be exposed” (JN 3:20).

“The world cannot hate you, but it hates Me because I testify of it, that its deeds are evil” (JN 7:7). 

“If the world hates you, you know that it has hated Me before it hated you. If you were of the world, the world would love its own; but because you are not of the world, but I chose you out of the world, because of this the world hates you” (JN 15:18-19).

“He who hates Me hates My Father also. If I had not done among them the works which no one else did, they would not have sin; but now they have both seen and hated Me and My Father as well. But they have done this to fulfill the word that is written in their Law, ‘They hated Me without a cause’” (JN 15: 23-25).

So, the Christianity which should have been rooted in the love-based teachings of Jesus alone, was instead founded by the Roman Emperor Constantine some three hundred years after Jesus’s resurrection and ascension. And it was based not on anything that Jesus taught, but instead it was based on the Emperor Constantine’s own fear-based ideas about Jesus’s having died for our sins. To ensure his false Christianity’s success, Constantine massacred or drove off into the deep desert every follower of Jesus who would not convert to His own fear- and hatred-based religion.

As we now contemplate the evils of a political system that uses the ginning-up of hatred in us of one politician against another, we must never forget one crucial fact. We come to earth to raise our personal spiritual vibration more toward love! That is the whole reason why we even are here in the first place. But if we submit to these hatred-filled political games, even for a moment, we might well be rendering useless and wasted our entire lifetime that is now being lived upon this earth!  

I have read a fiery gospel writ in burnished rows of steel
“As ye deal with my contemners, so with you my grace shall deal.”
Let the Hero, born of woman, crush the serpent with his heel,
Since God is marching on.
Glory, glory, hallelujah! Glory, glory, hallelujah!
Glory, glory, hallelujah! Since God is marching on!

He has sounded forth the trumpet that shall never call retreat!
He is sifting out the hearts of men before His judgment-seat
Oh, be swift, my soul, to answer Him! Be jubilant, my feet!
Our God is marching on.
Glory, glory, hallelujah! Glory, glory, hallelujah!
Glory, glory, hallelujah! Our God is marching on!

 In the beauty of the lilies Christ was born across the sea
With a glory in His bosom that transfigures you and me.
As He died to make men holy, let us die to make men free!
While God is marching on.
Glory, glory, hallelujah! Glory, glory, hallelujah!
Glory, glory, hallelujah! While God is marching on.
– Julia Ward Howe (1819-1910) & John William Steffe (1830-1890), from “Battle Hymn of the Republic” (1862).

God’s Hand

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

… You who dwell in the shelter of the Lord,
Who abide in His shadow for life,
Say to the Lord, “My refuge, my rock in whom I trust!”
… And He will raise you up on eagles’ wings,
Bear you on the breath of dawn,
Make you to shine like the sun!
And hold you in the palm of His hand.

… The snare of the fowler will never capture you,
And famine will bring you no fear.
Under His wings your refuge, His faithfulness your shield.
… And He will raise you up on eagles’ wings,
Bear you on the breath of dawn,
Make you to shine like the sun!
And hold you in the palm of His hand.
– Michael Joncas, from “On Eagle’s Wings” (1977)

I gave up on watching television around the turn of this century. It wasn’t anything I planned to do, but I cannot abide canned laughter, and gradually I stopped caring about whatever the daily news might be. And wow, what a sinkhole for time TV was! Lately, though, I have found that spending a little before-dinner time with my husband is nice. My mind peters out for working shortly before five o’clock each day, and our great room opens onto a snack counter into the kitchen, where my husband will be making our family’s dinner. I used to be a terrible cook, but my husband is a happy chef who does surprising things like using recipes and thinking through creative salads and desserts. I can chat with him across the counter while I do my daily treadmill steps.

My husband cares about politics. But I try hard to ignore politics, because it is one of my guiding principles that if I cannot effect an outcome, then I don’t want to even know about the problem. Why worry about something that you cannot fix? For Christmas last year, our children gave Edward what must be the world’s most gigantic television, which now takes up the wall above our great room fireplace. So last Saturday, he was watching a political rally get started while he made our dinner and I treaded away. I usually wouldn’t bother, but once I had finished my steps, I sat down on the couch for a moment and watched the start of the rally that he was watching. My only thought was amazement that so many people would sit in the un-sheltered sun for so long, just to hear from Donald Trump? Donald Trump, for heaven’s sake. Red hat and all. So he went up on that stage, and he began to talk. And then he turned his head to point out some things on a diagram, and there were pops that I knew were gunfire, although the announcer told us they were firecrackers. Trump grabbed at his ear, and then he ducked down on his own so I knew that he had not been hit. I thought perhaps an insect might have bitten him? But of course, by now you know the rest.

I had a live, front-row seat to the moment when Donald Trump’s fortuitous split-second turn of his head meant that instead of being assassinated on live TV, he came within a fraction of an inch of dying. Given the size of that television, it happened life-sized and right in front of me. I tried not to write about that moment this week. I swear. I really tried. But as much as I have repeatedly asked my Thomas to give me something else to write about, he has continued to flesh out that moment as a topic. He tells me that he wants all of us who are still in bodies to better understand how God will sometimes actively work in the world.

Very few people who are now alive are aware that there was a long-ago moment in American history when God also put God’s hand on the scale this way. It was during the American Revolutionary War. I only understand how close the American colonies came to losing their Revolution against the British Empire because thirty years ago I wrote My Thomas, which is an historically accurate novel about Thomas Jefferson’s ten-year marriage that neatly spanned that Revolutionary period. Back then, I did considerable research, so I know that it was really only the extremely fortuitous intervention of France on the side of the American colonies that enabled them to win their war. France sent a fleet to prevent Lord Cornwallis’s army from being rescued by sea at Yorktown, Virginia in October of 1781, which then forced Cornwallis to surrender his whole army to George Washington. And the painstaking courting of France to intervene on the colonies’ side had been largely the work of one of the unlikeliest of men, a charming reprobate named Benjamin Franklin. But it was a very near thing! If not for Benjamin Franklin, with his wit and charm and his amusing penchant for odd public inventions, and his willingness to spend so much time in France courting France’s support for the American colonies, Great Britain likely would have worn the American colonies down fairly soon thereafter, until they felt forced to sue for peace. British America then would have become like Canada or Australia. Not such a terrible fate, of course. But then there would have been no Declaration of Independence. No Constitution. And no government of, by, and for the people. No single continent-wide nation, and certainly not the heritage that we Americans 248 years later are so very proud to claim!

My Thomas tells me that indeed we witnessed a genuine miracle performed directly by God last Saturday evening. He wants us all to know that. As was true when God reached into human history and used the unlikely person of Benjamin Franklin to bring France into the American Revolution in order to give these colonies a freer and stronger beginning as a nation, with wonderful founding documents built around freedom for each individual and a continent-wide nation, so again on last Saturday eveing God reached into human history and turned Donald Trump’s head just enough and at just the right moment to save his life. We can only guess why. Perhaps, since God’s hand was in the founding of this nation, so also God’s interest continues in its governance? For whatever reason, it will be interesting to see now how this presidential election turns out, and whether God casts an overriding vote there as well. Thomas tells me that it is highly unusual for God to so minutely intervene in human events this way. But God, outside of time, knows our future risks, as of course you and I do not.

They are sometimes called “God Winks.” These unexpected moments when God reaches into human space and time and does something, and we notice it. The first time I was made aware that these things can happen was more than fifty years ago, in the late sixties or the early seventies, and in a popular science magazine. Back as late as the nineteen-seventies, apparently there were still many empty spots in the night sky remaining to be found. Who knew? And who cared? So back then, I came across an article in a popular science magazine by an astronomer whose hobby was filling in those empty spots in the sky. I kid you not. He would train a telescope on a spot in the night sky that was empty, and he would document that fact. Photograph it. Well, will you look at that! Entirely empty. Then he would come back precisely one year later and look at that same spot in the night sky through that same telescope, and now that spot would be full of billions of galaxies. His article in that old science magazine told us that this happened every time he tried it. He said that there were others, too, who shared his peculiar hobby. What would you call it?  Pointing out to God the spots in the sky that still needed to be filled in with stars? This astronomer predicted that before very long, it was going to be hard to find any starless spots left.

Nowadays astronomers’ equipment is a lot more sophisticated, and sometimes they still will find little weirdnesses in the night sky. In a recent case, what astronomers have found is a few fully-formed and mature galaxies at a time in the very early history of the cosmos when they simply should not be there. The human playground which is our reality was in fact created in relative earth-time a lot more recently than God wants us to believe that it was created. So of course, the cosmos is a lot younger as well, which means that our finding mature galaxies back then where they do not belong is not a God Wink, precisely; it is more like a “God Oopsie”, if you will.  But nobody is perfect!

Now let’s return to the topic of last Saturday’s genuine miracle performed by God. The more I consider it, the more amazing it seems. Late in the week I came across a computer reconstruction of how it happened that I would love to show to you now, but it was buried in a long article and not removable. Direct forehead shot. His head moves just enough at the last possible micro-instant, so instead of entering his forehead and his brain and killing him, the bullet grazes the right side of his head and then his head moves back again into what would have been the path if another bullet that had followed the first, just as his hand comes up in response to the pain of his having felt that first bullet hit his right ear. So he is beginning to duck down, and that next bullet just misses the top of his head. And it all happened in a micro-instant in earth-terms. Very neatly done, dear God, I must say. Truly amazingly very well done.

Donald Trump is two months older than I am. He was a publicity-hound when young, so I have always been aware of him. He had a big, brash, in-your-face ego, and he was a New York libertine. I can see how he might make a good politician, with that ego; and having run large businesses might have given him some good executive experience. But he didn’t seem to be the sort of morally upright person that you would think that God might choose? However, in the past week my Thomas has taught me that actually, Donald Trump is “of a type” that God does choose. Together with Benjamin Franklin and also the ancient Hebrew King David, born a thousand years before Jesus, who is someone else that Thomas has added to our short list of three who are the sort of man that God often relies upon for God’s Own purposes. Here are three reasons why:

FIRST, all three were sexual libertines when young. King David, Benjamin Franklin, and Donald Trump, all three of them were wild to an unusual extent for their respective places and times. Do you want to see a sexual libertine? I’ll give you one. King David had three hundred wives and seven hundred concubines, but he lusted after Bathsheba, too, so he arranged for her husband to be killed in battle since David had gotten her pregnant while the man was away fighting in David’s army. (She later gave birth to David’s heir, Solomon, but that is another story.) All of this might perhaps indicate an excess of testosterone in the three of them? Who knows? But it certainly seems to indicate that human sexual morality is not a priority on God’s list.

SECOND, they were and are big, ambitious, independent thinkers. Again, all three of them. And when it comes to caring about the well-being of the people they feel responsible for, these men’s morality is off the charts (Well, maybe David’s not quite so much) All three were and are fiercely courageous nonconformists, willing to stick their necks out, and to lead and to fight for their cause, whatever that cause might be. My husband tells me that in Donald Trump’s case, this means giving up a billionaire’s retirement for his vision that he can somehow reclaim the Founders’ original vision for the American people.

THIRD, they were and are amazingly stubborn about holding fast to whatever might  be   their cause. To see Donald Trump stand up at once with his fist in the air and his head above his Secret Service protection, even though he knew he had a bullet wound to the head for heaven’s sake and there still might be bullets flying, and he was shouting, “Fight! Fight! Fight!” was unbelievable. We were in full courageous-lunatic-battles-for-his-cause territory right there!

None of these men were traditionally religious. Not at first. King David grew to rely on God, and to become a wonderful psalmist as some of his more miraculous battlefield successes made it ever clearer to him that he was getting supernatural help. And some who watched the Republican Convention thought that Donald Trump, too, seemed to have about him the serene look of a man transformed. Is it true that when they brought on stage the uniform of Corey Comperatore, the fireman who died at that rally shielding his wife and daughters from a bullet, Donald Trump actually hugged and kissed the man’s uniform and helmet? It seems apparent that it wasn’t that these three men had chosen a religious cause to champion, but rather God knows our deepest hearts. And the causes that had seized each of these men’s minds were causes that also, even if  only by coincidence, turned out to be very important to God.

Of course, in this case we don’t yet know why God chose to save Donald Trump’s life. I have even wondered whether it might have been primarily for the nomination of JD Vance, the very young man of the people that Donald Trump chose for his vice president on the following Monday, that Trump’s life was saved. And since this is not a political blog I ask that you not discuss in the comments here any specific politician, but please save those discussions for more appropriate venues.

We only know that, amazingly and wonderfully, it did happen. God Winked at all of us last Saturday evening, and a life was saved. And no matter what your own politics might be, it does seem good for all of us to know that just as God cared enough 248 years ago to help those founding British  colonists to make a stronger beginning as a nation here, so God still seems to care enough about this nation now to have an opinion about who might be the better choice for our next president. Even though we don’t yet know the reason why God might have made this choice.

… You need not fear the terror of the night,
Nor the arrow that flies by day,
Though thousands fall about you, near you it shall not come…
And He will raise you up on eagles’ wings.
Bear you on the breath of dawn,
Make you to shine like the sun!
And hold you in the palm of His hand.

… For to His angels He’s given a command,
To guard you in all of your ways.
Upon their hands they will bear you up,
Lest you dash your foot against a stone.
… And He will raise you up on eagles’ wings,
Bear you on the breath of dawn.
Make you to shine like the sun,
And hold you in the palm of His hand.
… And hold you, hold you in the palm of His hand.
– Michael Joncas, from “On Eagle’s Wings” (1977)

Your Spiritual Time

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

I can see clearly now, the rain is gone.
I can see all obstacles in my way!
Gone are the dark clouds that had me blind.
It’s gonna be a bright, bright sunshiny day!
It’s gonna be a bright, bright sunshiny day!

Oh yes, I can make it now, the pain is gone.
All of the bad feelings have disappeared.
Here is that rainbow I’ve been praying for!
It’s gonna be a bright, bright sunshiny day!
Look all around, there’s nothing but blue skies.
Look straight ahead, there’s nothing but blue skies!
– Johnny Nash (1940-2020), from “I Can See Clearly Now” (1972).

The blog post that we gave to you last week was a labor of love for my beloved Thomas. Perhaps it was that for Jesus as well, although He lives His eternal life more privately. To be frank, I didn’t realize when my spirit guide asked me to search on “sin” in Biblegateway.com, the online searchable Bible, precisely what I was going to find that Jesus had said about sin during His entire earthly ministry. My memory had been, however, just what you saw from us last week, so when I did my search, I found no surprises. Jesus did indeed amazingly trivialize even the very concept of sin while He was here among us and teaching on earth.

Jesus did to sin pretty much what John Fitzgerald Kennedy did to fedora hats in 1960. During the whole first half of the twentieth century, and even during all of the Great Depression, no respectable man in the Western world would consider himself to be fully dressed without a suit and tie, an overcoat, and one of those stylish fedora hats! But JFK was elected President in 1960, and he didn’t like to mess up his hair, so I don’t think that he ever once in his life was willing to wear a fedora hat, not even to his Inauguration. So then within months after JFK’s election to the American Presidency, fedoras immediately and completely and forever no longer mattered at all.  

Jesus’s trivialization of the concept of sin was not quite so extreme as what JFK did to the concept of fedora hats, but it was close. Jesus simply reduced sin to its proper readily forgivable place, which is very far below God’s love in importance. And therefore, Jesus made the breaking of human religious rules to be now only minor and trivial, and quite readily instantly forgivable. But even that was a tremendous and a downright shocking step for Jesus to take in the first-century Hebrew world! I think it is hard now really for us to fully appreciate just how alarming Jesus’s teachings were to those who first heard them.

Those teachings must have hit people more or less the way the nineteen-sixties hit the world of the Fifties, only perhaps even more so. I was there in the Sixties. I remember it well! The nineteen-sixties were a wonderful time to be young, and if you are younger than maybe seventy years old now, I can only tell you that you missed something big. Oh yes, it also was awful in its way, what with the Vietnam War and the draft and the sense that whatever the previous culture had been, it was gone like a shot and it would never come back. But to be young at a sudden cultural hinge-point, and to realize that what you are witnessing is huge, also is a wonderful and glorious feeling, provided that the cultural hinge happens peacefully. As Jesus said, “I have come to cast fire upon the earth, and how I wish it were already blazing!” (LK 12:49)

Yes indeed, Jesus came to earth to kindle a major cultural and spiritual hinge, a cleansing fire of great modernization. When Jesus was on earth, He was the very model of a nineteen-sixties radical, a brilliant young man impatient with all the old ideas and all the old ways, and full of new ideas that were so extreme that they made you gape in amazement. I knew some radical young men in the Sixties. One of them was even my boyfriend. And they rather reminded me of Jesus, so on fire as they were with their big new ideas, and impatient as they were to transform the world. What they were peddling in the Sixties was a blend of socialism and communism, and I listened, but they were too extreme for me! I did try pot, although I never inhaled. And when my boyfriend urged me to come with him to California and join the Revolution, although I did love him, that was a bridge too far. I do think, though, that two thousand years ago, sitting on that hillside and hearing the extremely radical words of the Sermon on the Mount for the first time from the radical young man that Jesus was, even as un-radical as I was when I was young, I think that perhaps I would have gone for His particular brand of Big New Ideas.

A lot of people went for Jesus’s Big New Ideas! What He was preaching was a deep freedom of mind that was brand-new in the ancient world. It was freedom from all religious fears and constraints, and the notion of replacing it all with a radical forgiveness and love from God that was beyond anything that anyone ever had heretofore imagined. When Jesus was asked by a clergyman who was trying to test Him what was the foremost commandment, He didn’t name any of the hundreds of religious rules in the Hebrews’ religious rulebook, the Talmud. Instead He said, “‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ This is the great and foremost commandment.  The second is like it, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ On these two commandments depend the whole Law and the Prophets” (MT 22:37-40).

Wow, so that’s it? That really is all? Jesus does away with every one of those old rigid busybody religious rules, and He tells us that God truly does perfectly love and forgive us, without our having to pay attention to any of the rest of that religious nonsense? The only law now is that we must love God, and also we must love our fellow man? It was hard at first for people to believe that they really could be hearing Jesus right. And then Jesus performed miracles, and He died on the cross, and He rose from the dead to prove that our lives really will be eternal, and bit by bit His Word and His message began to catch fire and spread among men. And His Apostles patiently reinforced His words. So that really is It, then? For real? You mean it? Okay! Then I’m in! It is no wonder at all that with Jesus’s Apostles teaching as itinerant preachers, Jesus’s new Way spread so rapidly in the centuries after His death and resurrection, all the way around the Mediterranean Sea and as far away as Rome. Jesus’s Way had millions of devoted followers by the time the Roman armies set out to crush all aspects of His new movement but the one that Constantine decided eventually to make his own. And that one, of course, Constantine felt that He could use as a fear-based means of control. Constantine affirmed the central teaching of the strain that he preferred, which was that Jesus had died on the cross as a sin-offering. Then Constantine held the First Council of Nicaea in 325 CE to formalize his new Christian religion, and to create its Bible that was based on the Hebrew Law and the Prophets, where he included Jesus’s teachings as well.

This notion of Jesus as a Sixties-era radical is not only mine. Others also have seen the resemblance, but I never realized how perfect it is until a commenter to our post last week suggested that the Sixties-era song “I Can See Clearly Now” might make a good frame-verse. And then one of the classes that I am currently teaching happened to be studying Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount. There we all were, sitting on that hillside and listening to Jesus, and I thought, Omigod, there it is. Of course! He was creating a cultural hinge! Jesus even said it at the time!  

If it were not for Constantine’s destruction of Jesus’s Way, and his foolish creation of yet one more old-style religion in its place, surely long before now the whole world could have been following Jesus’s radical spiritual movement, which was brand-new two thousand years ago and based solely in God’s pure forgiveness and love!

As it is, however, we have been stuck with Roman Christianity for the past two thousand years. Like all religions, Christianity is fear-based and not love-based, and that is especially true in the case of Catholicism, and indeed also true of nearly all of the forty-two-thousand-odd versions of Christianity that are in existence today.  So as it is presently practiced, Christianity is hopelessly unable to be of much spiritual use to its faithful. Even if any uplifting love-based spiritual practice that was taught by Jesus might have been followed, it would have been weighed down and circumvented by every strictly practicing Christian’s overwhelming religious terrors. Down through the ages, however, there have been Desert Fathers and Mothers, and then monks and nuns, those living apart from the church’s fear-based teachings who have studied only the Lord’s words, and they have modeled after His teachings their very simple lives being lived apart from the world. And as we have said elsewhere, Jesus Himself has spent the past seventeen hundred years on the third astral level, and in devoted, single-minded service to the post-death healing of the hundreds of millions who have been damaged by Roman Christianity.

And meanwhile, as my Thomas is fond of reminding me, Jesus has become generally the most famous, the most popular, and considered the most influential person of all time. This is true, even though Jesus has not lived on earth for more than two thousand years! That is the one useful thing that Constantine’s religion actually has done for us: it has spread the precious name of Jesus in the most favorable possible terms far and wide. And as the religion that bears Jesus’s name but ignores what He taught at last is fading, we who love Jesus and who best understand the teachings that He gave to us as He originally taught them, free and untarnished by Roman Christianity’s fears, can begin at last to follow His true Way. We can make His Way the basis of our own spiritual lives. And then we can teach it to the world.

So, how can we begin at last to learn and to follow the Lord’s Way ourselves? Well, it’s simple, but it does require that you set aside some time each day to be with Jesus in God’s presence on that Judean hill. This must be your time alone with them in spirit. Ideally, it will be half an hour or more as your day is winding down. And do this every day! Habit is the secret to creating transformation.

You might experiment to see what works best for you. Here is what some people who want to immerse themselves in the Lord’s Word so they can better grow spiritually have found works well for them:

  • Leave off attendance at any Christian church, if you have not already done that. Even the sight of bare crucifixes can trigger residual feelings of  Christian guilt which are so habitual that you may not even be consciously aware of them.
  • Print the Gospel of Matthew, Chapters 5-7, in a print-size that is comfortable for you to read, and perhaps laminate it. You might do this with other favorite Gospel speeches by Jesus as well, and keep this reading material beside a comfortable chair in a private corner.
  • Welcome both God and Jesus into your mind. It can be best if you have a simple, short prayer to say, such as, “Dear God, dear Jesus, please help me to ever better understand and to ever more perfectly live my life according to these Gospel words…”
  • Read quietly aloud anything from a couple of paragraphs to as much as half a page, and really listen while you read. Mark with a paper clip the place where you leave off each day.
  • Sit with your eyes closed on that Judean hill and consider with God and with Jesus what you have just read. If other thoughts come, don’t fight them, but simply let them go. If thoughts feel at all negative, use the forgiveness mantra as you ease them from your mind: “I love you, I bless you, I forgive, and I release.”
  • After a while, you will feel that you have given this exercise enough time for tonight. It may be only ten minutes at first, but soon it will become effortlessly longer until it is as much as forty-five minutes. Slowly open your eyes. Thank God, and thank Jesus for having spent this time with you by saying aloud something like, “Thank you, Father! Thank you, Brother Jesus for helping me to better understand your words and helping me use them to better grow spiritually!”

You might eventually add other spiritual practices too, and perhaps some which involve more active sharing with others, as God might call you to do that. Always be listening to God’s voice within. But the certainty of Jesus’s voice on that hill always will be there to guide you.

My dear one, each day is yours to use as you might wish to use it. Yesterday is gone, and tomorrow is never promised, but still, we have this precious day. And we have the gift of this moment, which is why we call it “the Present.” So, why not begin a practice now of choosing to share some few minutes of each day that remains of your earthly life with God, and with Jesus? Yes, they are very busy. But as I say at the end of each of my podcasts, you in particular are God’s best-beloved child. And saying that to you each week never was my own idea….

I can see clearly now, the rain is gone.
I can see all obstacles in my way.
Here is that rainbow I’ve been praying for.
It’s gonna be a bright, bright sunshiny day!
It’s gonna be a bright, bright sunshiny day!
– Johnny Nash (1940-2020), from “I Can See Clearly Now” (1972)

Jesus and Sin

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

What a friend we have in Jesus, all our sins and griefs to bear.
What a privilege to carry everything to God in prayer!
O what peace we often forfeit. O what needless pain we bear.
All because we do not carry everything to God in prayer.

 Have we trials and temptations? Is there trouble anywhere?
We should never be discouraged. Take it to the Lord in prayer.
Can we find a friend so faithful, who will all our sorrows share?
Jesus knows our every weakness. Take it to the Lord in prayer.
– Charles Converse (1832-1918) & Joseph Scriven (1819-1886), from “What a Friend We Have in Jesus” (1865)

The Gospel teachings of Jesus with regard to sin are perfectly clear! And happily, what Jesus said has nothing to do with what Roman Christianity tells us about sin.  Of course, we always can continue to ignore what Jesus plainly said. We can assume that all the Christian churches are right, and Jesus came only to die for the notion that we carry the guilt of Adam’s sin, as well as our own manifold sin-guilt.  And while God insists that you and I must forgive,   of course we cannot expect that God is going to be willing to forgive you and me. Right? So God sent God’s sinless only Son to die in a horrible way to atone to God for your sins and mine. This idea made perfect sense in the Jerusalem of two thousand years ago, when Hebrews were still sacrificing unblemished animals as sin-sacrifices to God in their temples.

But now, of course, we can start to see some pretty big problems with this old Roman Christian teaching. And once we start to see these problems, we really never again can find a way to un-see them:

  • Jesus tells us that God never judges us. In the Gospel Book of John, Jesus says, “For not even the Father judges anyone, but He has given all judgment to the Son, so that all will honor the Son even as they honor the Father” (JN 5:22-23). Oh. Okay, so then Jesus is our actual judge? Well, not so fast. Jesus also tells us in that same Gospel of John that, “If anyone hears My sayings and does not keep them, I do not judge him; for I did not come to judge the world, but to save the world” (JN 12:47). Wow. Okay, so then Jesus assures us that there is no divine judgment at all. Which means that Jesus’s crucifixion must have happened for some reason other than the one that Roman Christianity gives us.
  • Or if Jesus’s death did happen as a sacrifice, then Jesus didn’t need to rise from the dead. Jesus made a great point of coming alive again after He was crucified and died, and He showed Himself to people as again alive. If the Roman Christian story about His crucifixion, which was that He died as a sacrifice to God for our sins, had been true, then He only needed to die. His coming alive again adds nothing. Again, this casts doubt on the sacrificial meaning that Roman Christianity gives to Jesus’s crucifixion.
  • God requires that you and I love and forgive, so then why does God need to see God’s much-beloved Son sacrificed for Adam’s sin and for our own sins before God can forgive us?? I have never understood this at all! And no minister or priest of whom I have asked this question has been able to explain it to me in a way that has made any kind of sense. Think about it! If you have children, picture your own precious children as a group of adorable toddlers playing on your living room rug. They manage to tip over the coffee table, so all their cups of orange juice make a big mess on the carpet. They are even giggling as they do it. What naughty babies! Now ask yourself which one of your own little children would you most enjoy watching being horribly murdered, just so you can forgive the others for making such a big mess on your living room rug? And if you recoil from that question, then ask yourself how it is possible that you are more loving and more forgiving than God is?

 The plain fact is that you are NOT more loving and more forgiving than God is. And the core dogma of the Roman Emperor Constantine’s version of Christianity, which is the version of Christianity that still in 2024 is practiced by some 2.4 billion people as the world’s most prominent religion, is obviously nonsense! That dogma, which is that Jesus died for our sins, may have made a modicum of sense in Jerusalem two thousand years ago, but clearly it makes no sense at all today. 

What did Jesus Himself say about sin? Well, this is somewhat complicated. First of all, remember these caveats:

  • Jesus came to move us past religions, and to teach us to relate to God directly. Doing this was not his primary mission perhaps, but it was important to Him. Every religion is man-made, and all religions are fear-based, so to help us to outgrow our adherence to religions was an important key to Jesus’s teaching us to begin a deeply love-based relationship with God.
  • While Jesus was on earth, He was teaching under the watchful eye of clergy who were always testing him. Since He often had to pay at least lip-service to the prevailing religion, He would sometimes trickily twist what He said in some way. We don’t always know what He would have said if He had not labored under this handicap.
  • Jesus lived among people who were obsessed with the concept of sin! The Hebrew community into which He was born was ruled by hundreds of religious laws and commandments that governed how they lived, often down to the smallest detail, including even what they ate, what they wore, and how they kept the Sabbath. The fact that transgressing any of these traditions and rituals was considered to be sinful irritated Jesus, when to His mind, God’s law of love was the only real law.

With these caveats in mind, let’s follow Jesus as He goes about His days and catch some of what He says about sin. Jesus seldom expounded directly on any sin just for its own sake.

The Gospel of John, Chapter 8, verses 2-11 is a famous moment when He dealt with sin.

8 2 Early in the morning He came again into the temple, and all the people were coming to Him; and He sat down and began to teach them. 3 The scribes and the Pharisees brought a woman caught in adultery, and having set her in the center of the court, 4 they said to Him, “Teacher, this woman has been caught in adultery, in the very act. 5 Now in the Law Moses commanded us to stone such women; what then do You say?” 6 They were saying this, testing Him, so that they might have grounds for accusing Him. But Jesus stooped down and with His finger wrote on the ground. 7 But when they persisted in asking Him, He straightened up, and said to them, “He who is without sin among you, let him be the first to throw a stone at her.” 8 Again He stooped down and wrote on the ground. 9 When they heard it, they began to go out one by one, beginning with the older ones, and He was left alone, and the woman, where she was, in the center of the court. 10 Straightening up, Jesus said to her, “Woman, where are they? Did no one condemn you?” 11 She said, “No one, Lord.” And Jesus said, “I do not condemn you, either. Go. From now on sin no more.”

The Gospel of Luke, Chapter 7, verses 36-50 shows us both that Jesus did have some religious friends, and that He didn’t hesitate to teach them what is really important!

36 Now one of the Pharisees was requesting Him to dine with him, and He entered the Pharisee’s house and reclined at the table. 37 And there was a woman in the city who was a sinner, an immoral woman; and when she learned that He was reclining at the table in the Pharisee’s house, she brought an alabaster vial of perfume, 38 and standing behind Him at His feet, weeping, she began to wet His feet with her tears, and kept wiping them with the hair of her head, and kissing His feet and anointing them with the perfume. 39 Now when the Pharisee who had invited Him saw this, he said to himself, “If this man were a prophet, He would know who and what sort of person this woman is who is touching Him, that she is a great sinner.”40 And Jesus answered him, “Simon, I have something to say to you.” And he replied, “Say it, Teacher.” 41 “A moneylender had two debtors: one owed five hundred denarii, and the other fifty. 42 When they were unable to repay, he graciously forgave them both. So, which of them will love him more?” 43 Simon answered and said, “I suppose the one whom he forgave more.” And He said to him, “You have judged correctly.” 44 Turning toward the woman, He said to Simon, “Do you see this woman? I entered your house; you gave Me no water for My feet, but she has wet My feet with her tears and wiped them with her hair. 45 You gave Me no kiss; but she, since the time I came in, has not ceased to kiss My feet. 46 You did not anoint My head with oil, but she anointed My feet with perfume. 47 For this reason I say to you, her sins, which are many, have been forgiven, for she loved much; but he who is forgiven little, loves little.” 48 Then He said to her, “Your sins have been forgiven.” 49 Those who were reclining at the table with Him began to say]to themselves, “Who is this man who even forgives sins?” 50 And He said to the woman, “Your faith has saved you; go in peace.”

Here in the Gospel of Matthew, Chapter 9, Verses 1-8, is the sort of thing that happens often in the Biblical Gospels, where Jesus uses His forgiveness of sins as an instrumental part of His healing work.

9 Getting into a boat, Jesus crossed over the sea and came to His own city.2 And they brought to Him a paralytic lying on a bed. Seeing their faith, Jesus said to the paralytic, “Take courage, son; your sins are forgiven.” 3 And some of the scribes said to themselves, “This fellow blasphemes.” 4 And Jesus, knowing their thoughts, said, “Why are you thinking evil in your hearts? 5 Which is easier, to say, ‘Your sins are forgiven,’ or to say, ‘Get up, and walk’? 6 But so that you may know that the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins”—then He said to the paralytic, “Get up, pick up your bed and go home.” 7 And he got up and went home. 8 But when the crowds saw this, they were awestruck, and glorified God, who had given such authority to men.

And in the Gospel of Matthew, Chapter 12, Verses 1-8, is one of many examples of Jesus and His disciples easily and often breaking the rigid Sabbath rules.

12 At that time Jesus went through the grain fields on the Sabbath, and His disciples became hungry and began to pick the heads of grain and eat. 2 But when the Pharisees saw this, they said to Him, “Look, Your disciples do what is not lawful to do on a Sabbath.” 3 But He said to them, “Have you not read what David did when he became hungry, he and his companions, 4 how he entered the house of God, and they ate the consecrated bread, which was not lawful for him to eat nor for those with him, but for the priests alone? 5 Or have you not read in the Law, that on the Sabbath the priests in the temple break the Sabbath and are innocent? 6 But I say to you that something greater than the temple is here. 7 But if you had known what this means, ‘I desire compassion, and not a sacrifice,’ you would not have condemned the innocent.8 For the Son of Man is Lord of the Sabbath.”

The four quotations given above are typical of the ways in which Jesus dismissively handles legalistic sins repeatedly, over and over again throughout all four of the Biblical Gospels. Far from seeing the Hebrews’ notion of sin as the strictly punishable disobedience of many rigid rules, the breaking of which can carry as much as a death sentence immediately inflicted, Jesus sees such old-style sins as only easily pardonable stumblings in nearly all cases. Because nearly all kinds of sin are to Him just minimal transgressions against God’s robustly ascendant and all-powerful law of love! Therefore, they all are now readily forgivable in love.

Jesus says of all these sins against human-made laws and rules only, “Do not judge so that you will not be judged. For in the way you judge, you will be judged; and by your standard of measure, it will be measured to you” (MT 7:1-2). Only learn to forgive, and you will be forgiven!

There are just two sins left which Jesus tells us are unpardonable:  

  • “Truly I say to you, all sins shall be forgiven the sons of men, and whatever blasphemies they utter; 29 but whoever blasphemes against the Holy Spirit never has forgiveness, but is guilty of an eternal sin” (Mark 3:28-29).
  • 17 He said to His disciples, “It is inevitable that stumbling blocks come, but woe to him through whom they come! 2 It would be better for him if a millstone were hung around his neck and he were thrown into the sea, than that he would cause one of these little ones to stumble” (Luke 17:1-2).

Thomas and I debated whether that verse in Luke really does denote for Jesus an unpardonable sin. So then Thomas asked Jesus directly, and Jesus has confirmed for us that, yes, He did indeed mean to tell us that the only unpardonable human sin is to lead a child astray.

So there you have it. Jesus gives us in His four Biblical Gospels, and not at all hidden but just seldom read, this easily understood primer in the fact that you can throw away all the religious guilt associated with the false notion that Jesus died for your sins. That whole bogus teaching that God needed Jesus’s death on the cross for your sins came from others. It never came from Jesus! No, God is infinitely more loving and more forgiving than that. God loves you perfectly, and God forgives you completely. Jesus chose to die and then to rise from the dead just to prove to you that there is no death. And oh, my beautiful darling one, God’s most cherished of all God’s precious children, for you this indeed is a glorious new day!

Intelligence?

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

All things bright and beautiful, all creatures great and small,
All things wise and wonderful, ‘Twas God that made them all.
Each little flower that opens, each little bird that sings.
He made their glowing colors, and made their tiny wings.

 The purple-headed mountains, the rivers running by.
The sunset, and the morning that brightens up the sky.
The cold wind in the winter, the pleasant summer sun,
The ripe fruits in the garden, He made them, every one.

 All things bright and beautiful, all creatures great and small,
All things wise and wonderful, ’twas God that made them all.
He gave us eyes to see them, and lips that we might tell
How great is the Almighty, who has made all things well.
– Cecil F. Alexander (1818-1895), from “All Things Bright and Beautiful” (1848)

As I was still thinking about my previous blog post last Sunday morning, I chanced to spot the latest issue of Scientific American lying on our front-hall table. Not so long ago, those popular science magazine covers would trumpet enticing articles about major breakthroughs in important fields like the origin of matter, the origin of life, the secret life of cells, genetics technology, or perhaps about this or that other wonderful materialist scientific triumph soon to be made by the glorious heroes of modern science! And their cover illustrations were brightly varicolored interiors of cells, or diagrams of DNA and RNA in action, or else they might be intensely varicolored shots of interstellar space. Even maybe fifteen years ago, the fun of what it surely was to be a well-employed research science would be dancing laughingly right off the paper of every one of those magazine covers.

 And what is the title of this latest issue of Scientific American’s breakthrough cover article? It is The New Science of Health and Appetite: What humans really evolved to eat and how food affects our health today. I kid you not! And the cover picture is a drawing of a burnt-orange hand holding a burnt-orange fork which carries an unappetizing sketch of burnt-orange food. All of this is displayed on a pale-yellow background. To my mind, it looks so unappealing that you might as well either read that promised article, or else you could just sit and watch paint dry. 

What I have been trying to understand of late is why the thought of intelligent design still so deeply horrifies mainstream scientists. When I was a child, I was so eager to confirm that my childhood experiences of light must of course be confirmation that there is a God behind it all that the first thing I did right out of college was to spend two years deep in researching life after death, until I had convinced myself that the afterlife is real, and therefore that God must be real. You would think that discovering that intelligence (or consciousness) is a necessary component of life, which clearly it is, would seem like good news to scientists?

This split between studying material reality and studying non-material reality actually began more than two thousand years ago as a gentleman’s dispute between Plato and Aristotle. And of course, the split actually made no sense even then. It should seem obvious to anyone who feels a physical need to breathe that just because something lacks mass, size, color, and weight and it cannot be perceived by the naked eye, we cannot assume that it is not important! So it should have been obvious to the breathing scientists who, at the turn of the twentieth century, decided that they were going to turn mainstream science into the study of matter alone that this self-imposed ban on studying what is not material was self-evidently flat-out stupid. But those scientists do deserve a modicum of our pity. The poor souls were still reeling from the advent of quantum mechanics.

It is difficult for those of us who are not physicists to comprehend just what a clout to the head quantum physics was for Newtonian physicists at the turn of the twentieth century. One notable physicist whose name escapes me actually had said at the end of the nineteenth century that just about everything had been discovered in physics by whatever date that was, and all that was left to be done was finer and finer measurements. And then along came quantum physics, and the whole science of physics was altogether upended. By 1918, Max Planck was being awarded the 1918 Nobel Prize in physics as the father of quantum mechanics; and as he delved into it further, he came to ever more fully understand that what you and I experience as consciousness was a new and wondrous element to be investigated, in and of itself. In 1931, Dr. Planck said, “I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness. We cannot get behind consciousness! Everything that we talk about, everything that we regard as existing, postulates consciousness.” And in 1944 he said, “As a man who has devoted his whole life to the most clear-headed science, to the study of matter, I can tell you as a result of my research about atoms this much: There is no matter as such. All matter originates and exists only by virtue of a force which brings the particle of an atom to vibration and holds this most minute solar system of the atom together. We must assume behind this force the existence of a conscious and intelligent mind. This mind is the matrix of all matter.”

Max Planck had discovered the genuine Creator not by positing a God, but rather by coming at that creator from the position of the created particle. And the scientific gatekeepers flat could not have that! It was this whole flirting with invisibles that the gatekeepers simply could not abide, because Planck’s doing that brought the discipline of science too near to the woo-woo notion of an invisible God. But humankind has long assumed that God was some sort of pre-existent, separate Person anyway, a kind of invisible Big Guy in the Sky. And if God was an entity separate from God’s material creation, then it was reasonable, and indeed it was even necessary, to assume that this material creation could be studied separately from its Creator. Well, fair enough. But then the next step of course was for those who were studying this separate created reality to decide that reality could easily be studied without any reference to a Creator at all. So as our culture had evolved past the Middle Ages, so had the increasingly modern scientific theory that all of this matter around us can easily have arisen and evolved entirely randomly. Therefore, long before Max Plank discovered the genuine God in the twentieth century, indeed back as far as that intellectual rivalry between Plato and Aristotle, some people had begun to assume that you could study material reality without making reference to where it may have come from. So Max Planck’s fellow scientists thought there was no point to his even bringing God’s Mind up now!

 There probably is a long and complex history to Darwinian theory that I should have studied more closely. I do recall that there were some competing theories of evolution in the nineteenth century, and I was caught up in reading about those for a time in the nineteen-seventies. I thought as a result of my studies that mainstream science’s complete embrace of Charles Darwin (1809-1882) and his theory of evolution had been too hasty and simplistic, when Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (1744-1829), for example, had championed the useful evolutionary refinement that some characteristics or tendencies may be acquired during the life of an animal and passed down to that animal’s descendants, which would make evolution more efficient and also likely more rapid. And I think that an objective study of the evidence proves that Lamarck was at least partly right. But it seems to have been during the nineteenth century that mainstream science as a whole formalized itself into this anti-divine-intelligence, and just-matter-alone sort of very dry discipline. And it seems even to have been the discovery that evolution does actually in fact happen that made the scientific gatekeepers first come to decide that their new materialist dogma would be enforceable against naturally obstreperous and free-thinking scientists.

And so, very early in the twentieth century, the scientific gatekeepers forcibly shut mainstream science down as a system where scientific research which included any element of intelligent design at all was ever allowed to be included in any research product that was being taught in any university department or published in any peer-reviewed article to be included in any scientific journal. While quantum mechanics was still in its infancy, and Max Planck and the other early quantum physicists still were proving that non-local action and other weird quantum effects actually are perfectly real, those gatekeepers were imposing the new “fundamental scientific dogma of materialism” on all aspects of scientific research. Research scientists were no longer allowed to include intelligent design in any aspect of their study of any natural phenomenon whatsoever.

This newly imposed and enforced scientific supposition, simply put, must be that all of reality randomly arose in an instant without any Creator at all, and from there reality must have evolved entirely by random happenstance. What first existed of this whole universe was an endless and timeless nothing. And then a “Big Bang” happened 13.7 billion years ago, and its product changed and evolved on its own to become all of this, including every star, planet, atom, green plant, dinosaur, mosquito, kitten, and you and me. All of it occurred with no Creator at all, and for no reason at all. It was entirely random. Which, on its face, seems to make no sense. Actually, after the word “random” in the prior sentence, I wanted simply to write, “So therefore after the Big Bang happened, that nothing from before the Bang expanded endlessly into eternity. The End.” But that is not what actually happened. Instead, we have in what was amazingly short order ended up in possession of this goldilocks planet which is ideally situated and fine-tuned for life; and here you and I live what are apparently highly purpose-driven lives, although that is a story for another day.

Just as an aside, what is Intelligent Design, anyway? If you Google the term, you will be dismissively told that it is “a pseudoscientific argument for the existence of God.” I haven’t linked you to the Wikipedia article, and I have changed the title of this blog post at the last minute as well, because the Wiki article, and the scientific community itself, are so insultingly dismissive of the term. But I have seen enough now to be certain that indeed the verdict is decisively in, and this universe cannot have arisen randomly. At least some aspects of the components of cells, and some elements of life, plus other things as well could never have evolved without the help of an intelligent designer, not even in a literal infinity of random chance attempts.

So it is not surprising that over the course of the otherwise scientifically highly productive twentieth century, research scientists gradually gave up on a lot of their mission of discovery as mostly hopeless.  And there is no need here really even to document their manifold failures! While technology was doing wonders to ever better our lives, Darwinian evolution as a theory was being shot full of numberless holes. And scientific efforts to discover how matter, and then how life came into being all on their own were essentially found to be hopelessly unachievable.

Then came the founding of The Discovery Institute in 1991. The research scientists there carry on as do research scientists everywhere, except that that they assume that a Christian God is behind it all, providing the spark of life, guiding evolution, and planning and shaping the design of those first cells. And they have solved many of the problems that mainstream scientists had brought upon themselves with their materialist dogma in pursuing the origin of matter and the origin of life, and so much more! This is one of The Discovery Institute’s very many cheery cartoons. This cartoon explains how positing an intelligent designer can solve the otherwise insoluble problems that arise when scientists attempt to address how our cells repair the daily damage being done to DNA. These cartoons are at once silly and entertaining, and yet they are surprisingly sophisticated.

Most recently, some of the best research scientists are coming to concede that intelligent design may actually be on the scientific cutting edge. First, because the political left’s wokeness has begun in some cases to put atheists on the same side of debates as the intelligent design crowd, as some entirely worthy materialist scientists are even losing their university positions now for not being sufficiently politically “woke”. And second, because in at least one case, an evolutionary biologist couple has felt forced to concede that an intelligent design research scientist is in fact on the scientific cutting edge.  And in any event, as far as origin of life research is concerned, intelligent design researcher James Tour remains the undisputed king.  Dr. Tour has managed to solve every origin-of-life problem, while the materialists in this field still are nowhere.

My dear ones, I cannot begin to tell you how foolish this whole materialist scientific dispute looks to everyone who still retains even a modicum of common sense! As the great Nikola Tesla said, “The day science begins to study non-physical phenomena, it will make more progress in one decade than in all the previous centuries of its existence.”

All things bright and beautiful, all creatures great and small,
All things wise and wonderful, ’twas God that made them all.
He gave us eyes to see them, and lips that we might tell
How great is the Almighty, who has made all things well.
– Cecil F. Alexander (1818-1895), from “All Things Bright and Beautiful” (1848)

Science’s Despair

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

It seems we’ve stood and talked like this before.
We looked at each other in the same way then,
but I can’t remember where or when.

The clothes you’re wearing are the clothes you wore.
The smile you are smiling you were smiling then,
But I can’t remember where or when.

Some things that happen for the first time
Seem to be happening again.
– Lorenz Hart (1895-1943) & Richard Rodgers (1902-1979), from “Where or When” (1937)

A few research scientists are trying to find the moment in proto-human history when the first entirely human mind kicked in and developed awareness that was deeply and profoundly human. But they seem to be having little success at finding just that precise moment. The problem may lie in their inability to define just which characteristics of the mind they are going to accept as constituting a fully modern human being. Since, after all, each creature’s environment will call forth needed skills from its mind, and if more advanced skills are not required, then that specific creature might have every conceivable human characteristic, but it still likely won’t display them all for far-distant future researchers to see. This is a fascinating question to contemplate, though, don’t you think?

With the recent availability of the reasonably funded and first-rate Seattle-based Discovery Institute, which pursues research science with no materialist restrictions on  its  research scientists at all, lots of sensible, if perhaps somewhat frivolous, questions like this one are now being asked, and such questions are giving our minds a playful place to experiment with seeking answers. Meanwhile, of course, the materialist scientific community continues to more and more hopelessly soldier on its stubbornly materialist way. Mainstream science has just discovered of late that there has been massive fraud among published scientific papers on such a gigantic scale that a recent article in The Wall Street Journal describes how fake scientific papers by the tens of thousands, and even whole fake scientific journals by the many dozens are being discovered, and they all must be discarded.  This watching the materialist scientific boat springing so many leaks really boggles the mind!

I have been among the world’s most eager materialist-science groupies for the past forty years. Every month I would devour half a dozen popular-science magazines, Scientific American first of all but always several others besides, and for years they were full of smug and self-important articles about what the scientific community was just about to discover or to prove to be true about reality. It was all going to happen almost any minute now. For all of the nineties and into the aughts, materialist science’s strong emphasis was on origin and development of the universe and origin and development of life, and testing and proving various theories about when and how these things must have happened without the need to ever posit any form of a Creator or an Un-Caused Cause. Proving and refining Darwin’s theories, too. Everything must have originated and developed from nothing all the way to its lushly current form, entirely without any kind of intelligent intervention whatsoever.

But then, sometime around 2005 the realization began to dawn within the scientific community as a whole that things were not at all working out as everyone had been expecting that they would. As the Discovery Institute continues to prove to us ever more completely, the Intelligent Design explanation is turning out to be ever more clearly the only universally viable way to answer every question about the origin and development of anything. So now, the whole field of mainstream science is sadly drooping like a maiden who has been forced to take to her fainting-couch.

As a result, young scientists have no real clue about the fields in which they can acceptably do their research anymore without running afoul of their scientific gatekeepers. And those gatekeepers are, of course, the university science departments and those now deeply frustrated peer-reviewed science journals. So young scientists of the twenty-first century have apparently done a lot of faking it. Which is why so many of their – shall we say – “creative” scholarly papers must now be dumped.  But this having been forced to resort to committing fraud should not be seen as altogether their fault. The materialist game was always hopelessly rigged against them.

As for me, I still read popular science magazines on occasion, which is easier since everything is now online. But somewhere around a decade ago, reading popular science magazines mostly stopped being fun, because mainstream scientists have given up even pretending that they are on the edge of discovering anything really big. The origin of the universe? The origin of matter? The origin of life? The source of consciousness inside the human brain? Materialist scientists know by now that all their quests are going to be dead-ended. Now it is just, here is a new kind of dinosaur that looks just like the old kinds of dinosaurs, but they imagine this one to have looked even frillier, and it is presumed to have been more colorful. Cloud-geoengineering is being done, and it affects where heat waves will show up; and apparently climate change will make fungi more dangerous. And this is now the very best that they can do for attention-grabbing science news headlines?

By way of contrast, here are some of the kinds of amusing and enjoyable articles that still were being published in popular-science magazines as recently as ten years ago. Physics takes a walk on the wild side in this one, because somehow we are all made of free particles! I loved this article, even though I cannot understand it because I am not a particle physicist. I never took even a high school science course, but just by reading so many popular science magazines, eventually I learned so much about science that I was independently able to discover the fact that consciousness underlies everything. Of course, this author doesn’t actually say that all that exists is consciousness, but you can pretty easily infer that fact when you read enough of these articles. And here, amazingly, some science writer got away with telling the truth about the fact that matter is energy, and it is almost entirely empty space. Again, it’s a flirt with the truth about consciousness. These authors and the publications for which they wrote were testing the rules ten years ago, to see how far the materialist scientific gatekeepers would let them go. But the draconian answer turned out to be, “Not even an inch!” So that was when many of those fraudulent peer-reviewed papers that are now being rooted out and tossed were written and published in desperation, just so young scientists could find jobs or get tenure.

But to be a materialist science gatekeeper today means that you are going to have to police even the civilian publications, where you sometimes can find articles or side notes now proclaiming that death is an illusion. Bully for MSN! No matter how the materialists try to knock it down, the truth is going to start popping up more and more nowadays, through every crack and crevice. Because it is in fact matter that is the complete illusion, a fact which is now easily provable, so the silly “fundamental dogma of materialism” around which more than a century ago those gatekeepers built modern mainstream science should long since have been discarded. But the scientific gatekeepers never found the moment when it felt easy enough to give it up, and by now they have gone too far down that pointless materialist track to nowhere.

Genuine science is supposed to be freewheeling and joyous! Was it Albert Einstein who said he never actually had worked a day in his life? No, it was Thomas Edison who said that. But Einstein likely would have said the same thing. If what you do for a living is fun, then it never is work! My science-groupie habit has mostly switched over to following the Discovery Institute. There the science lacks any dogmas at all, and it still is free and joyous.

Which is why much of my former enthusiasm for educating myself with popular science magazines is being channeled now into following what is going on at the Discovery Institute. They continue to demolish the theory of blind evolution, true, to make sure that Darwin’s Frankenstein monster remains truly flat-out dead. But also, they provide all sorts of information and general public education. I don’t necessarily always agree with them. I continue to seek just the objective truth! But Discovery is up-front about where its bias is: these are trained scientists who are practicing Christians, and they are not materialists. So these are truly honest scientists. Which can never be true of mainstream scientists, all of whom are lying in not publicly disclosing the fact that they will not study anything which they consider to be not material.

The Discovery Institute covers lots of fun things, too. For example, this spring there are two big batches of trillions of periodic cicadas emerging in the American Midwest at once, in a combination that hasn’t happened since 1803, when Thomas Jefferson was the American President. And Discovery uses this concept of periodic cicadas, which emerge from the ground in batches like clockwork every thirteen years or every seventeen years, depending on their clan, as just another of very, very many examples of amusing things that simply could not have developed by natural selection and survival of the fittest because there is not a sufficient survival advantage to their having developed these particular traits. There is, however, as there is in so many things, from a giraffe’s neck to an elephant’s trunk to a kangaroo’s peculiar kangarooishness, to – I don’t know – the orchids in my office window and the angle at which the sunlight hits your lawn and each of a trillion other wondrous things in science a very significant fun advantage! And you have the sense that Discovery gets that. They do some of their best teaching of adults with simple and often adorable videos which you appreciate being able to enjoy during a quick break now and then before you head on back to work. But everything about the Discovery Institute is fun. Perhaps the worst thing about mainstream scientists and their clinging to their pointless materialist lie is the fact that even as they continue to hold back from the public the truth about their materialist bias, to the great disadvantage of humanity and for no good reason, they remain so joyless about it!

That is always true of closed-minded people who fight truth because they prefer their own lies. As the great polymath Nicola Tesla said, “The day science begins to study non-physical phenomena, it will make more progress in one decade than in all the previous centuries of its existence.” And in holding to their lie of materialism, mainstream scientists are very much like the white Dixiecrat bigots of the failed American South, who bitterly clung to racial segregation for a century after the Civil War. But the greatest American of the twentieth century, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., taught us how to respond to pointless evils as he fought the Dixiecrats’ greatest evil of them all. Dr. King said,

“We Negroes have long dreamed of freedom, but still we are confined in an oppressive prison of segregation and discrimination. Must we respond with bitterness and cynicism? Certainly not, for this will destroy and poison our personalities. Must we … resign ourselves to oppression? Of course not, for this blasphemously attributes to God that which is of the devil. To cooperate passively with an unjust system makes the oppressed as evil as the oppressor. Our most fruitful course is to stand firm with courageous determination, move forward nonviolently amid obstacles and setbacks, accept disappointments, and cling to hope. Our determined refusal not to be stopped will eventually open the door to fulfillment.…”

Dr. King’s words ring down to us through time, and now they lift our hearts! As he so well taught us, we must continue to live in free and uncompromising science, no matter what any others may do, until eventually materialist scientists drop their nonsensical bigotry against the truth and they follow Nicola Tesla’s lead and “study nonphysical phenomena”. We must continue to live in the truth! Because we know that free science of the sort being practiced at the Discovery Institute is on the side of truth. And as Jesus also taught us (JN 8:32), sooner or later, whether now or a hundred years from now, eventually the truth will win.

Some things that happen for the first time
Seem to be happening again.

And so it seems that we have met before,
And laughed before, and loved before!
But who knows where or when?
– Lorenz Hart (1895-1943) & Richard Rodgers (1902-1979), from “Where or When” (1937)

Love Above All

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

O Lord my God, When I, in awesome wonder,
Consider all the worlds Thy Hands have made;
I see the stars, I hear the rolling thunder,
Thy power throughout the universe displayed.

Then sings my soul, My Saviour God, to Thee,
How great Thou art, How great Thou art.
Then sings my soul, My Saviour God, to Thee,
How great Thou art, How great Thou art!
– Carl Boberg (1859-1940) & Stuart K. Hine (1899-1989), from “How Great Thou Art” (1949)

You and I are urged to love God, to love Jesus, and to love our fellow man, so the notion that love is a spiritual concept is not surprising to us at all. But it was Jesus who first made love our spiritual imperative! When Moses led the Hebrew people back out of Egypt in the year 1476 BCE after their four-hundred-year-sojourn in Egyptian slavery, God then gave to Moses on the top of Mount Sinai those Ten Commandments by which God’s chosen people were henceforth commanded to live their lives. And while God was delivering His Ten Commandments on the mountaintop, there was smoke, and thunder and lightning, and the sound of a trumpet, so the people shrank away and were terrified. They said to Moses, “Speak to us yourself, and we will listen; but let not God speak to us, or we will die!” (Ex 20:18-19) If love was eventually to become God’s eternal core commandment, wouldn’t you think that God might have maybe mentioned love ro His chosen people back then, if only to offer some comfort as they were being forced to sojourn in the wilderness? But, no. Behold from Exodus 20, God’s Ten Commandments that were handed down to the Hebrew people four thousand, five hundred years ago, amid smoke, lightning, and even a trumpet’s blare:     

From the year 1476 BCE on and throughout the Old Testament, people will on occasion show love for one another, and some of them develop what seems to be a genuine love for God. Consider David, especially. The boy shepherd and psalmist who grew to become a great king of Israel a thousand years before Jesus was born seems in his many profound and beautiful psalms to have developed a surprisingly deep and loving and even quite modern-seeming relationship with God. But still, in all the years before Jesus was born, the Hebrew people’s relationship with God remained deeply respectful and primarily transactional. They had to have clergymen and scribes through whom they related to God, and they had to offer animals as sacrifices in their temples. The Jewish people prior to the advent of Jesus didn’t love God on a personal level, as you and I might think of love. As always has been true whenever people have related to God by means of a human-made religion, they were afraid of God.

So I don’t think it is possible for us to appreciate what a shock to their whole system Jesus’s teachings were in the first-century world in which He taught on earth. Please again read that list of Ten Commandments above, and remember that God delivered them from the top of a mountain amid smoke, lightning flashes and a trumpet’s blare. This was what constituted spirituality in the minds of people in the first century CE, at the time and in the place where Jesus was born on earth. People then were certain that it was adherence to formal religious rules and practices that must of course be what mattered most to God!

Okay, so after fifteen hundred years of their having lived and worshiped that way, then along came Jesus. And what do we know about Jesus, from the Gospels? For one thing, we know that Joseph, Jesus’s earthly father, made sure that Jesus received as he grew up an excellent religious education. Jesus could argue the fine points of scripture with ease and with anyone, and that was important. Jesus was also quite charismatic. He spoke well, and in every group of people He would tend to be the center of it. Think of the most likable guy in your entire high school class, the smartest student and probably also the best athlete. That was Jesus.

Jesus was also what we might call a flaming radical when compared with the stodgy religious teachers around Him, which made Him especially popular as people followed Him around. They were eager to hear whatever He might say next! That list of Ten Commandments that by Jesus’s day were thought of as ancient Holy Writ were to Jesus’s mind quite bendable, and the crowds loved to hear Him successfully handle challenges from religious scholars of His opinions on one or another of those ancient religious rules. To Jesus, the rules were not important. It was the motive behind the way each rule was applied or not applied that was important. “People break the Sabbath all the time to haul their donkey out of a pit, don’t they?” So then, one day and in a single stroke, Jesus used God’s much greater rule of love – a rule that until He began to teach, no one had ever heard of before – to wipe away all Ten Commandments in a single stroke, and with them the whole of what we call the Old Testament. Jesus replaced the entire Hebrew Law and the Prophets with God’s new and greater Law of Love.

This is truly amazing! The Pharisees and the Sadducees were two different schools of Jewish scholars. In the early days of Jesus’s public ministry they would tag-team test Him, until fairly soon He had worn them all down. Jesus seemed to delight in these battles of wits that He was having with stodgy religious scholars, and it is not hard to see why they soon became so fed-up with Him. Here is that wonderful example:

34 But when the Pharisees heard that Jesus had silenced the Sadducees, they gathered themselves together. 35 One of them, a lawyer, asked Jesus a question, testing Him. He said, 36 “Teacher, which is the greatest commandment in the Law?” 37 And Jesus said to him, “‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ 38 This is the great and foremost commandment. 39 The second is like it, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ 40 On these two commandments depend the whole Law and the Prophets” (MT 22 34-40).

So Jesus has at last here in one stroke superseded all of the Ten Commandments, and the entire Old Testament with them, and He has commanded us instead to love God and to love our fellow man with everything that is in us! Not because our love is something that God needs, but because, amazingly, Jesus completely understood when He was on earth the makeup of reality, as twenty-first-century materialist scientists still to this day do not understand reality, even two thousand years later! Jesus knew that only what we experience as consciousness exists, and He knew that consciousness is governed by what we experience as emotion. What more certain proof that Jesus came to us as a divine Being can there ever be than this? And because He knew these great truths about reality, He knew that in order for us to grow spiritually, we would have to shed every one of our fears, and especially our ancient fear of God, and learn to embrace ever more perfect love. So Jesus’s teachings are all about helping us to do precisely that!

Religion is a primary source of fear in every culture, so Jesus made it clear repeatedly that He had come to abolish all religions, and to teach us to relate to God individually and based upon love alone. He battled the prevailing religion throughout His public life, and He specifically told us to pray to God in private. For example, He said, 5 “When you pray, you are not to be like the hypocrites; for they love to stand and pray in the synagogues and on the street corners so that they may be seen by men. Truly I say to you, they have their reward in full. 6 But you, when you pray, go into your inner room, close your door and pray to your Father who is in secret, and your Father who sees what is done in secret will reward you (MT 6:5-6). And He was always putting down the clergy, saying things like this: 46 “Beware of the scribes, who like to walk around in long robes, and love respectful greetings in the market places, and chief seats in the synagogues and places of honor at banquets, 47 who devour widows’ houses, and for appearance’s sake offer long prayers. These will receive greater condemnation” (LK 20:46-47).

Jesus told us repeatedly to love one another! He often said things like, 34 A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another, even as I have loved you, that you also love one another. 35 By this all men will know that you are My disciples, if you have love for one another.” (JN 13:34-35)

As Jesus prepared to leave His disciples, that was how He left them. He charged them with spreading over all the earth His great command that we love God and love one another. 18 Jesus spoke to them, saying, “All authority has been given to Me in heaven and on earth. 19 Go therefore and make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them and 20 teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you; and lo, I am with you always, even to the end of the age.” (MT 28: 18-20)

So then we imagine Jesus watching with fond parental eagerness as The Way spread rapidly following His resurrection. But as the decades passed, it occurred to Him that His followers were not sufficiently emphasizing love! They were getting caught up in what He would have seen as extraneous details, like their ability to “speak in tongues”, or to prophesy, or their giving to charities perhaps, or who among them had the greatest faith, and so on. They were even caught up in how many were being martyred, while they were already forgetting that teaching all their new converts to love was by far the most important thing! So my Thomas tells me that maybe three decades after His resurrection, Jesus channeled a letter from the Apostle Paul to the Church at Corinth, to try to nudge The Way back onto its love track more directly. And when you know that Jesus is the one writing this letter, and not Paul, you clearly can see that. Dear old fussbudgetty Paul’s letters all read very differently from this one! Enjoy, my dear ones, Jesus’s last earthly message to us all:

13 If I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, but do not have love, I have become a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. 2 If I have the gift of prophecy, and know all mysteries and all knowledge; and if I have all faith so as to remove mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. 3 And if I give all my possessions to feed the poor, and if I surrender my body to be burned, but do not have love, it profits me nothing.

4 Love is patient, love is kind and is not jealous; love does not brag and is not arrogant, 5 does not act unbecomingly; it does not seek its own, is not provoked, does not take into account a wrong suffered, 6 does not rejoice in unrighteousness, but rejoices with the truth; 7 love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.

8 Love never fails; but if there are gifts of prophecy, they will be done away with; if there are tongues, they will cease; if there is knowledge, it will be done away with. 9 For we know in part and we prophesy in part; 10 but when the perfect comes, the partial will be done away with. 11 When I was a child, I spoke like a child, thought like a child, I reasoned like a child; when I became a man, I did away with childish things. 12 For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face; now I know in part, but then I will know fully, just as I also have become fully known. 13 But now faith, hope, love, these three abide; but the greatest of these is love. (1 Cor 13)

“Faith, hope, love, these three abide; but the greatest of these is love.” These are the last words that we have from Jesus on earth. And fitting final words from Him to us they are!

When Christ shall come, with shout of acclamation,
And take me home, what joy shall fill my heart.
Then I shall bow, in humble adoration,
And then proclaim: “My God, how great Thou art!”

Then sings my soul, My Saviour God, to Thee,
How great Thou art, How great Thou art.
Then sings my soul, My Saviour God, to Thee,
How great Thou art, How great Thou art!
– Carl Boberg (1859-1940) & Stuart K. Hine (1899-1989), from “How Great Thou Art” (1949)

 

Humankind Discovers God

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

Praise to the Lord, the Almighty, the King of creation!
Oh my soul, praise Him, for He is thy health and salvation!
All ye who hear, Now to His temple draw near;
Sing now in glad adoration!

Praise to the Lord, who o’er all things so wondrously reigneth,
Who, as on wings of an eagle, uplifteth, sustaineth.
Hast thou not seen How thy desires all have been
Granted in what He ordaineth?

Praise to the Lord, who hath fearfully, wondrously, made thee!
Health hath vouchsafed and, when heedlessly falling, hath stayed thee.
What need or grief Ever hath failed of relief?
Wings of His mercy did shade thee!
– Joachim Neander (1650-1680), from “Praise to the Lord, the Almighty” (1668)

As we write these weekly posts together, the topic will arrive in my mind from Thomas by the previous Monday afternoon. The frame-verse will play from him soon thereafter, and by the end of Wednesday we will have written at least the first manuscript page. We got that far this week on schedule, but then I got a flood of legal work. No worries. I always keep Fridays to finish this blog post, and we had the elements clearly in mind by Thursday. With Thomas’s help, I could have finished that original post just fine on Friday. But then on Friday morning, he wanted to start all over again with a whole new idea. So that is what we are doing now. I fought him on it, but you might as well try to stop a bulldozer as to stop my dear Thomas.

And Thomas feels so energized now! He wants to tell you the story from Genesis that we have been telling to our students this week in the two courses that he and I are currently teaching. Thomas considers it to be important for all of you to hear this story, and he wants us to tell it to you this minute. He assures me that, sure, we can get it all written in a single day! So, let’s just see. We should right now be finishing things up, but instead we are beginning all over again.

As you know if you have been with us here for even a little while, the only thing that in fact exists is what we experience as human Consciousness. All that we see and experience around us that seems to be real is in fact illusion, including our own material bodies and all that happens to us here on earth. I capitalize the word Consciousness, of course, because like all forms of energy, Consciousness vibrates, and at its highest and most rapid vibration, Consciousness is only love, which is, in its very purest essence and highest vibration, the Creator God. It is our understanding that nothing whatsoever above the Ultimate Creator God exists.

At its lowest and slowest vibration, of course, Consciousness is all the ishiest emotions, like fear, anger, and hatred. At various levels of vibration along the range between purest love at the very top and fear and hatred at the bottom, exist all of our human minds. So we are all part of that one great Consciousness! Because, of course, nothing else exists. And our purpose in coming to earth is simply to raise our own Consciousness vibrations farther away from fear and rage and closer to ever more perfect love. But of course, that whole concept of spiritual growth is a topic beyond the scope of today’s conversation.

We have previously discussed here the fact that the first human beings, and more than ninety percent of modern animals all came into existence at the very same time, only two hundred thousand earth-years ago. And as recently as that, every human being then alive lived in Botswana, in Africa. Genuine Garden of Eden, anyone? Even somewhat closer to today, there were at least two near-extinction events for humankind, one of which was caused by a severely adverse climate event around 150,000 earth-years ago, during what was called the Marine Isotope Stage 6 Period. Life for those first real people was so hard! Not only did all the polar ice caps and glaciers around the world expand during the Marine Isotope Stage 6 Period, but all the deserts did as well, since the atmosphere had so much moisture sucked out of it by the ice. And the area of the world most affected by this extreme ice age and extreme dry period combined was southern Africa, where the entire world population of fully human beings then still lived. It has been estimated that at the anatomically modern human population’s lowest point, there were fewer than a thousand people left alive on this entire planet. And every human being who is alive now on earth is descended from Mitochondrial Eve, who lived at that time. She is our common many-greats grandmother.

These people who lived two hundred thousand years ago, and even right down to a few thousand years ago, were all entirely human people!  All their minds, like ours, were part of that one Consciousness which is all that exists. So they all were part of the Mind of the Ultimate High Creator God. And as is true of all other real people, they would have felt a yearning for union with the Creator God. Each of us feels that same yearning today, but perhaps without understanding quite what it is that we are feeling, just as they likely would not have understood it. And those who did have perhaps any glimmer of understanding could not have made any genuine connection with God, what with the confusing clamor of all their many human-made gods that then was filling their minds.

Because of course those first real people would have done what all real people do. At once, they were busy inventing gods in their own image. We have found some small, rotund female figurines carved from stone which surely had religious significance, and there were probably male figures, too, perhaps carved from bone or wood or both, that would have been too fragile to survive. There is evidence that people were burying their dead with rituals at least a hundred thousand years ago and in what is now Israel, which suggests that at least that far back, and in that location, people were beginning to believe in an afterlife. But for nearly all of human history, people everywhere worshiped multiple gods at once that were human-like, fierce and fickle, and represented by idols which each had a different specialty. Gods and goddesses of harvest, hunting, gathering, pregnancy, weather, and so on were the universal norm for nearly the whole two hundred thousand years of genuine humankind’s existence. And gradually, the worst of these gods grew bigger and fiercer. Worst of all was likely Moloch of the Canaanites. He was gigantic and made of stone, and he had a fire in his belly into which he required that all his worshipers’ first-born infants be tossed so he could burn them alive.

How could the genuine Creator God ever relate to people through all this whole dense human-made religious mess? Had the genuine God spoken to any of them back then, people just would have assumed that they were hearing from one of the many human-made gods that they long had worshiped. So God had to wait for humankind to further mature spiritually.

And then eventually, rather late in the day, along came the Hebrews. These were tribes of nomadic shepherds who had developed the notion of worshiping just a single invisible god. I have long thought that this was what God had been patiently waiting for, throughout all those two hundred thousand years of humankind’s existence. God could never relate to people who had not yet grasped the concept of a single Deity with a Mind, much like a single person with a mind. A Deity with whom they might relate by Mind. The Hebrews were the world’s first true monotheists. And they even have preserved a backstory which was passed down at first as an oral history, and is told now in the Biblical book of Genesis. Their story involves a patriarch of the Hebrews named Abraham who develops with God an amazing spoken relationship in Abraham’s mind.

Abraham and his wife, Sarah, are nearly a hundred years old as this tale opens in about 2070 BCE, and Sarah is barren. To very much simplify their story, Abraham and Sarah are in despair over having no heirs, but then God, speaking in Abraham’s mind, promises Abraham that “One shall come forth from your own body, and he shall be your heir.” Remember that Abraham and Sarah are nearly a hundred years old! And this voice of God speaking in Abraham’s mind is a very new thing in the world. God takes Abraham outside and says, “Now look toward the heavens, and count the stars, if you are able to count them. So shall your descendants be.” 6 Then Abraham believed in the Lord; and God reckoned it to him as righteousness. (So then, my dear friends, God first introduced Godself to a human being!) 7 God said to Abraham, “I am the Lord who brought you out of Ur of the Chaldeans, to give you this land to possess it.”  Abraham said, “O Lord God, how may I know that I will possess it?” 9 So God said to him, “Bring Me a three-year-old heifer, and a three-year-old female goat, and a three-year-old ram, and a turtledove, and a young pigeon.” 10 Abraham brought all these animals and birds, and he cut them in two, and laid each half opposite the other; but he did not cut the birds. 11 The birds of prey came down upon the carcasses, and Abraham drove them away.12 Now when the sun was going down, a deep sleep fell upon Abraham; and behold, terror and great darkness fell upon him. 13 God said to Abraham, “Know for certain that your descendants will be strangers in a land that is not theirs, where they will be enslaved and oppressed for four hundred years. 14 But I will also judge the nation whom they will serve, and afterward they will come out with many possessions. 15 As for you, you shall go to your fathers in peace; you will be buried at a good old age. 16 Then in the fourth generation they will return here, for the iniquity of the Amorite is not yet complete.” (This is a foretelling of the Hebrews’ sojourn in Egypt.) 17 It came about when the sun had set, that it was very dark, and behold, there appeared a smoking oven and a flaming torch which passed between these sacrificial pieces. 18 On that day the Lord made a covenant with Abraham, saying, “To your descendants I have given this land, From the river of Egypt as far as the great river, the river Euphrates.”  Sarah did then indeed conceive at almost 100 years old, and she bore Isaac for Abraham.

(This has been a summary from the Biblical book of Genesis, Chapters 15 through 21.)

Right after this summary, in Genesis Chapter 22, verses 1-14, when the long-awaited and much-treasured Isaac is still a young lad, the genuine God who speaks to Abraham in his mind wants to make certain of Abraham’s loyalty, so we get this:

“Now it came about that God tested Abraham, and said to him, ‘Abraham!’ And he said, ‘Here I am.’ 2 God said, ‘Take now your son, your only son, whom you love, Isaac, and go to the land of Moriah, and offer him there as a burnt offering on one of the mountains of which I will tell you.’ 3 So Abraham rose early in the morning and saddled his donkey, and took two of his young men with him and Isaac, his son; and he split wood for the burnt offering, and arose and went to the place of which God had told him. 4 On the third day, Abraham raised his eyes and saw the place from a distance. 5 Abraham said to his young men, ‘Stay here with the donkey, and I and the lad will go over there; and we will worship and return to you.’ 6 Abraham took the wood of the burnt offering and laid it on Isaac his son, and he took in his hand the fire and the knife. So, the two of them walked on together. 7 Isaac spoke to Abraham his father and said, ‘My father!’ And he said, ‘Here I am, my son.’ And he said, ‘Behold, the fire and the wood, but where is the lamb for the burnt offering?’ 8 Abraham said, ‘God will provide for Himself the lamb for the burnt offering, my son.’ So, the two of them walked on together. Then they came to the place of which God had told him; and Abraham built the altar there and arranged the wood, and bound his son Isaac and laid him on the altar, on top of the wood. 10 Abraham stretched out his hand and took the knife to slay his son. 11 But the angel of the Lord called to him from heaven and said, ‘Abraham, Abraham!’ And he said, ‘Here I am.’ 12 He said, ‘Do not stretch out your hand against the lad, and do nothing to him; for now I know that you adore God, since you have not withheld your son, your only son, from Me.’ 13 Then Abraham raised his eyes and looked, and behold, behind him a ram caught in the thicket by his horns; and Abraham went and took the ram and offered him up for a burnt offering in the place of his son. 14 Abraham called the name of that place The Lord Will Provide, as it is said to this day, ‘In the mount of the Lord it will be provided’” (GEN 22:1-14).

My dear ones, humankind’s relationship with the Creator God began when God chose from among all the primitive people who were living in the world four thousand years ago to reach out to a righteous man from among the world’s first true monotheists. And Abraham listened to and trusted God, and he believed. Through Abraham, humankind discovered the genuine God, and Abraham became the Patriarch of not just Judaism, but also of Christianity and of Islam. He is the spiritual father now of close to four billion people worldwide.

So, yes, the Jews are God’s chosen people, in that God chose to reach out first to them. But they are few in number now. And antisemitism is an ancient hatred. I had thought that it was now long past, but we are learning this spring that is not the case!

My beloveds, as we love God and as we love one another, antisemitism must be fought as the evil that it is! Does God still prefer the Jews over others? No, of course not. And in fact, God has never preferred the Jews over other people. God spoke first to Abraham only because four thousand years ago, God chose the Hebrews as the first people with whom He thought that He could successfully communicate. And indeed Abraham developed an extraordinarily relationship with God, one that was based in love and in absolute trust. God chooses the Jewish people still, as God’s canary in the coal mine of human love and kindness. Until antisemitism is at last no more, there can be no hope for universal peace and love in this world for any of us. 

Praise to the Lord, who doth prosper thy work and defend thee,
Who from the heavens the streams of His mercy doth send thee.
Ponder anew What the Almighty can do,
Who with His love doth befriend thee.

Praise to the Lord! Oh, let all that is in me adore Him!
All that hath life and breath, come now with praises before Him!
Let the Amen Sound from His people again;
Gladly for aye we adore Him.
– Joachim Neander (1650-1680), from “Praise to the Lord, the Almighty” (1668)

What Does He Mean?

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

Day by day, Day by day,
Oh Dear Lord, Three things I pray.
To see thee more clearly, Love thee more dearly,
Follow thee more nearly, Day by day.

 Oh… Day by day, Day by day,
Oh Dear Lord, Three things I pray.
To see thee more clearly, Love thee more dearly,
Follow thee more nearly, Day by day.

 Day by day, Day by day,
Oh Dear Lord, Three things I pray.
To see thee more clearly, Love thee more dearly,
Follow thee more nearly, Day by day.
– Stephen Schwartz, from “Day by Day,” from “Godspell” (1971)

For my whole life I have struggled to find ways to ever better understand what Jesus meant by all the things that He said two thousand years ago, when He taught on earth. Almost as soon as I was able to read such sophisticated language as is in the Bible, I was attempting to read the four Biblical Gospels in a little copy of just the Gospels that some Mormon missionaries had given to each of the children in my Congregational Church’s Sunday School. And even as a young child, almost every time that I attempted to read Jesus’s Gospel words, I seemed to be finding new shades of meanings in what He was saying there. So to deepen my perspective, by the age of eleven I had graduated to reading the whole Bible through, from Genesis right through Revelation, just a couple of pages every night. I wanted to see what added perspective all the rest of the Bible might add to what Jesus was saying to us in just His four Books. And then of course I went on to major in early Christian history in college.

One of the things that I learned in college was that if I hoped to better understand my treasured Jesus’s deeper thoughts, I would have to deal with some additional complications. For one example, Jesus spoke Aramaic while He was on earth, but His teachings were first written down in Greek some sixty or so years after His resurrection. So that was their first language translation. And later on, of course, would come a second translation from Greek into Latin in the early Middle Ages. Then after additional centuries had passed would come yet more translations, into English and into other modern languages. And with each translation, additional fallible human translators had to make many decisions which might do at least some level of violence to what Jesus originally had said in the lyrical and emotional language that was His original Aramaic. The classic example often used to illustrate this problem is the Greek word “Metanoia”. What Jesus almost certainly first said in Aramaic, which then was translated into Greek as “Metanoia”, was “transform your mind.” But the early Medieval Christian monk who first saw that word “Metanoia” in Greek is known to have translated it into the Latin command that we must “repent”. And that is how the insistence that we all must “repent!” ended up as a command from Jesus throughout the first Latin translations of His spoken words. Even though it surely was nothing that Jesus said, nor was it anything that He ever would have said!

But remember that by the Middle Ages, that monk who was Jesus’s first translator from Greek into Latin was a member of the Roman Emperor Constantine’s fear-based Christian religion, which is the Christianity that still prevails in the world today. That monk never knew the genuine Jesus, nor did he have any idea of what the genuine Jesus actually had taught. And the Christian religion of that Medieval monk who first translated the words of Jesus was built not around love, of course, but instead his Christianity was centered on the ancient Hebrew religious idea that Jesus had come to die as a pure sin-sacrifice to redeem us from God’s judgment for our sins. Jesus had been a sin-sacrifice without blemish. That whole pure sin-sacrifice idea had been a concept central to the religion of the ancient Hebrews, and it was well known to the Apostle Paul. It was familiar as well to the Councilors at the Council of Nicaea in the year 325 who had created Constantine’s Christian religion. The monk who did that first Latin translation therefore readily believed that the Jesus he was sure must have founded the Christianity that he devoutly followed later on would of course have ordered us all to “repent”!

But Jesus was not the founder of what eventually became modern Christianity. What Jesus Himself created was “The Way,” which was the beautiful and simple love-based spiritual way of life that He taught to His disciples. The Way that Jesus gave us then grew rapidly for the first two hundred years after His death and resurrection, all around the Mediterranean Sea until it had amassed millions of followers as far away as Rome. And our great tragedy as we try to ever more deeply understand and draw closer to the true Jesus now is the unavoidable fact that human history always is written by its winners. The Romans decided that they probably could use The Way, as successful as it had been in gaining followers, but not in its original form. So they ruthlessly persecuted and crushed it, and they nearly wiped it out. By the early 300s, there was almost nothing left of Jesus’s original Way but its scriptures, which still had the name of Jesus attached to them when Constantine resurrected The Way in 312. It then was formalized as Roman Christianity at the First Council of Nicaea in the year 325 CE. By then, The Way had allowed all sorts of spiritual side-dogmas to develop; and in order for it to be useful to Rome, Constantine’s version of Christianity needed to be transformed from a spiritual movement into a fear-based religion that would make it an efficient means of mass human control. First Nicaea’s new version of Christianity was therefore built around a lesser dogma that had developed within The Way, which was that Jesus’s death on the cross had been a sin-offering required by God to cleanse us of our sins.

Still, the core of Jesus’s teachings when He was on earth had not been focused on sin. And the Councilors who were creating this new religion of Christianity under Constantine’s direction, and were assembling their new religion’s sacred Book, held a sufficient reverence for the teachings of Jesus that fortunately they left nearly all of His teachings just as they had received them, and they put what they added in the course of building their new religion just at the back of each of their chosen four of the many accounts of Jesus’s words that were then in circulation. Thomas tells me that He and some of Jesus’s other followers not then in bodies were influencing the minds of many of the Councilors at First Nicaea, and at the six other first millennium councils. So they were able to shape to a considerable extent what happened at all of those councils, especially with regard to the selection and preservation of those four Biblical Gospels.

The way that the Christian Bible was assembled at First Nicaea with what we now know was spiritual guidance, and then carefully preserved thereafter, ensured that the precious words of Jesus would be largely preserved. Yes, there are some contradictions within the Gospels themselves as to what we are told that Jesus said, but those contradictions come largely from translation issues, from Christian dogma-based contradictions, from some First Nicaean Councilors’ additions, and from the frank fact that as they invented their religion, the Councilors never thought to check to see whether they were going against any of the spoken teachings of Jesus, who was the Prophet that they were claiming as their nominal founder. Here are examples of each of these problems:

  • Translation Concerns. Some Biblical translations with the oldest roots still show Jesus calling on us to “Repent,” when what He really said was that we should “Reform our minds.” Modern English translations are generally freer of this kind of distortion resulting from the first translations from Greek into Latin.
  • Jesus had to speak circumspectly because He was often speaking directly against the prevailing Hebrew religion, which was then quite powerful. And in fact, Jesus came to free us from all religions. It is important to keep these facts in mind! For example, since the prevailing Hebrew religion when and where Jesus taught was largely focused on sin, and perhaps we might even say that it was obsessed with sin, so Jesus often had to responds to the issue of sin, although in His own teachings, Jesus didn’t focus on sin. Instead, His teachings focus on love and forgiveness. That is a crucial distinction! Jesus is often quite casual about disregarding sins. For example, consider this passage: “At that time Jesus went through the grain fields on the Sabbath, and His disciples became hungry and began to pick the heads of grain and eat. But when the Pharisees saw this, they said to Him, ‘Look, Your disciples do what is not lawful to do on a Sabbath.’ But He said to them, ‘Have you not read what David did when he became hungry, he and his companions, how he entered the house of God, and they ate the consecrated bread, which was not lawful for him to eat nor for those with him, but for the priests alone? Or have you not read in the Law, that on the Sabbath the priests in the temple break the Sabbath and are innocent? But I say to you that something greater than the temple is here. But if you had known what this means, ‘I desire compassion, and not a sacrifice,’ you would not have condemned the innocent. For the Son of Man is Lord of the Sabbath.’” (MT 12:1-8)
  • The Councilors Added a Number of Things to the Gospels That They Likely Wished That Jesus Had said. And what they added often directly contradicts what Jesus did say, and what is objectively true! For example, when Jesus asked His disciple, Simon, who Simon thought that Jesus was, the disciple is reported to have said, “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.” Jesus then reportedly said to him, “Blessed are you, Simon, because flesh and blood did not reveal this to you, but My Father who is in heaven. I also say to you that you are Peter, and upon this rock I will build My church; and the gates of Hades will not overpower it. I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven; and whatever you bind on earth shall have been bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth shall have been loosed in heaven” (MT 16:16-19). This is obviously one of the First Nicaea Councilors’ additions! Note: “Petros” means “rock” in Greek, but Jesus spoke Aramaic; Jesus never built a “church”; “hades” does not exist, and anyway it would not have “gates”; the kingdom of heaven has no keys; and Jesus could give no human being the power to bind or to loose anything in heaven.
  • Some of what the First Nicaean Councilors Left in the Gospels As Having Been Said by Jesus Directly Contradicts the Core Dogma of Their New Christian Religion. This really confused me when I was a child! The most notable of these problems is that the Christian religion as the Romans designed it has Jesus dying as a pure sin-sacrifice. But Jesus tells us right there in the Biblical Gospel of John that neither God nor Jesus ever judges us. Jesus says,  “For not even the Father judges anyone, but He has given all judgment to the Son, so that all will honor the Son even as they honor the Father” (JN 5:22-23), and “If anyone hears My sayings and does not keep them, I do not judge him; for I did not come to judge the world, but to save the world” (JN 12:47). Therefore, no sin-sacrifice is needed! And if no sin-sacrifice is needed, then Jesus didn’t need to die as a sin-offering, did He? His death and resurrection were, after all, precisely what He tells us that they were, just His own triumphant demonstration of our eternal life.

Then too, of course, there is the plain fact that Jesus never was speaking in a vacuum. His Gospel words always were at least in part dependent on what was going on around Him, who He was addressing, and what the stage of His ministry was at that moment. This point is especially important! Jesus was always sensitive to His listeners, and He spoke very differently, for example, to clergymen, for whom He had little use, or when He spoke to poor widows, or to earnest young seekers, or to His closest disciples and friends. Modern Christians will often carelessly pluck a few of Jesus’s random words from the Gospels and cite them just in sentence-fragments, as if they were definitive proclamations. And if you do that, you might cause your listeners to misunderstand Jesus’s Mind pretty severely!

As the religion that the Roman Emperor Constantine created seventeen hundred years ago is falling apart around us now, it is fragmenting pretty severely. I recall that when The Fun of Dying was first published in 2010, I was astonished to learn that there were then some ten thousand denominations of Christianity in existence. And now, only fourteen years later, amazingly, there are more than forty-five thousand forms of Christianity extant worldwide, which is simply unbelievable. Yet still, we have our one patient and infinitely loving Jesus waiting for us! Amazingly, there is enough of Him for all of us to share. And Jesus has one clear message preserved for us in one set of four Biblical Gospels, still lovingly protected by Him, by my Thomas, and by the rest of Jesus’s faithful minions not now in earthly bodies. All the struggles of the past two thousand years are nearly altogether over. And Constantine’s Christianity is looking pretty hopeless to most of us at this point. So Jesus does ask one thing of us now. He hopes that we who love Him will try to begin to come together now, and resume The Way of Jesus again, my dear ones, if we possibly can?

Day by day, Day by day,
Oh Dear Lord, Three things I pray.
To see thee more clearly, Love thee more dearly,
Follow thee more nearly, Day by day by day by day…
– Stephen Schwartz, from “Day by Day,” from “Godspell” (1971)

 

For Shame

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

You who dwell in the shelter of the Lord, who abide in His shadow for life,
Say to the Lord, “My refuge, my rock in whom I trust!”

And He will raise you up on eagles’ wings, bear you on the breath of dawn,
Make you to shine like the sun! And hold you in the palm of His hand.
The snare of the fowler will never capture you. And famine will bring you no fear.
Under His wings your refuge, His faithfulness your shield!

And He will raise you up on eagles’ wings, bear you on the breath of dawn,
Make you to shine like the sun! And hold you in the palm of His hand.
You need not fear the terror of the night, nor the arrow that flies by day.
Though thousands fall about you, near you it shall not come!
– Michael Joncas, from “On Eagle’s Wings” (1977)

The moment when I found this article about a ten-year-old boy who killed himself because he was being bullied at school felt to me like the worst moment of my long life. I kid you not. I still haven’t managed to make myself read the whole article, so I don’t know what method little Sammy chose to end his life. It was just the picture of that very little boy that did it for me. That small, dorky face. And his age, for heaven’s sake! How does a ten-year-old child even conceive of the concept of suicide? And his parents repeatedly asked his teacher and the school system to protect him, but there was not a single person who did anything for him? So, why didn’t his parents pull him out of that school? Why did no adult protect that child?

It was left just to Jesus to prove to Sammy how very much he was loved, so Jesus came and took him home. That was all I could think as I wept for that little boy. And I look at his picture now, and I see Albert Einstein perhaps, when he was small. He could so easily have looked as dorky as that little boy looks. Or maybe Bill Gates, or another of the modern tech giants. Just think of all the wonderful things little Sammy might have done for this world, as bright and sensitive as he possibly was, as kindly as perhaps he was, or even as simply normal as he was, if he just had been given the chance to live his life. But he never had that chance. And of course, I blamed myself first of all. That I wasn’t there, somehow. I wanted to be there so I could bring him home with me and protect him, so no one ever could hurt him again.

I got over my initial emotional crisis. I don’t so much blame his parents, who must be devastated. But I do deeply blame that school system! And I blame all elementary school systems that allow any bullying at all to happen to children who are too young to defend themselves. I recall that there was bullying when I was in a public school a million years ago, and that was the reason why we sent our own children to parochial schools at first; and when I learned that there was some bullying even there, then we switched them to private schools. But when I was in public school so long ago, a few children in each class were always targeted, so retroactively now, I do blame myself for never having defended those classmates. I even recall one bullied girl by name. Edna had that clumsy name, and her family lived in a little trailer on a field that was littered with salvaged auto-parts. I wish now that I had been strong enough to stand up to the bullies who teased Edna about her shabby life and her thrift-store clothes. And I also recall my long-ago sense of satisfaction when our worst school bully got pregnant and had to drop out of high school. I realize now how wrong of me that was, and I feel retroactively sorry about her as well.

After a couple of days, I was partway over the shock of that dreadful news about Sammy, but still not past the horror of his death by suicide when he was so very young. And then as I was clearing emails on Wednesday morning, I came across an obituary for a mother of a boy who had killed himself because at the age of twelve he had been sexually abused by a Catholic priest. So then she had spent the whole rest of her life fighting the Church over its silence about the extent of sexual abuse by priests that happens within the Catholic Church. And Thomas said to me at once, “How many little boys have killed themselves because they were sexually abused by Catholic priests?” I said, “What?” I never had thought about that. “But surely they were older?” He bitterly said, “Not by much.”

At Thomas’s insistence, over the next few days I  tried to squeeze myself down a slimy rabbit-hole  that until now I have ignored. Omigod, my Thomas is so right! This is a horrific scandal that long has harming the most vulnerable children. A few girls, but mostly boys. And it probably rivals worldwide the American school-bullying scandal in terms of the number of victims who are severely damaged by it, and the intensity of the harm that has been done to them.

In the specific case of sexual abuse of children by Catholic clergy:

  • The perpetrators are clergy who are completely trusted by the children and by their parents, and those clergy are protected and defended by their church superiors. Until very recently, children and their parents who complained about the sexual abuse of children by their priests would be instructed to keep their complaints to themselves, and they could generally be silenced.
  • For decades, going back as far as the nineteen-forties, the children might even be blamed for what had happened to them, and called actually sinful. Children, and even their parents, could generally be controlled by clerical superiors who held over their heads the supernatural powers of heaven and hell, and they could be told that God would punish them for tattling.
  • Whenever too many complaints were received about any one particular priest, he would simply be transferred to a different parish, where he would continue to abuse children for many more years. The documented histories of this having happened in the cases of some of the most egregiously offending priests are only lately coming to light, and they are appalling to read.
  • The secrecy that surrounded these clerical abuse cases would not have been possible if the priests had been in any other profession. Had they been doctors, say, or teachers, these stories would much more easily have come to light. But the superstitious fears surrounding priests who could call down hellfire on you if you got on their bad side was enough to allow this horrible destruction of the lives of children to go on for seventy well-documented years, and perhaps in some cases for a century or more.

Even now, the Catholic church and its clergy are still being powerfully protected. I have spent three days, off and on, trying to find reliable hard statistics on the numbers of children who have been sexually abused by Catholic priests worldwide, and such numbers are still fragmented and largely anecdotal. What I have found are pages and pages of Google links to articles that were what amounted to very limited admissions at first, kind of “modified limited hangouts” by bishops and by the Vatican over decades of time, as the secular law at last got involved in all the various countries. The Catholic church never once came out in front of any of these investigations, and never once tried to own this situation, insofar as I could see! But instead, and shamefully, the Catholic Church continued to recruit generation after generation of starry-eyed altar boys with no warnings to them, and no warnings to their parents, and it gave all those adolescent boys over to the tender mercies of clergymen who were forced to live outwardly celibate lives. You and I would of course assume that back in the sixties perhaps, as this all started to come to very limited light, the Vatican must have right away come down hard on all its priests and insisted that every bit of abuse must stop. But they were already suffering a priest shortage, so they seem not to have done that, amazingly enough. Instead, they offered just some discreet counseling.

Extrapolating from what has been reported in a few countries, since 1950, more than a million boys and men worldwide have already come forward and reported that during their childhoods, they were sexually molested by a Catholic priest, and these boys and men have been believed. But these were only the ones who were believed! It seems clear from browsing in older articles that very many more were coming forward in the forties through the sixties who were not believed, but instead they were shamed into silence. And seeing that, one assumes that there likely were still more who were abused, but who chose to keep that fact to themselves. We are told, too, that boys made up only about eighty percent of the priests’ total child-victims. I think it is therefore likely that the total number of children worldwide who were sexually abused by priests since 1950 must have been perhaps three million.  

And unlike schoolchildren who are bullied only by other children, even one instance of sexual molestation by a powerful adult like a priest is going to have a fairly severe effect on a young child. In the little time that I had in which to research and write this post, I couldn’t do much research on the effects of priestly sexual abuse on its victims, but the results of the bits of research that I managed to do were horrifying. In one case of a priest who had abused five altar boys when they were twelve years old, four of the five had initially wanted to grow up to become priests themselves, which was why they had become altar boys in the first place. But after having been abused by that priest, all four boys who had wanted to be priests had instead killed themselves as teenagers. I couldn’t find much in the way of studies done on abuse victims as adults, but in general, the effects of childhood sexual abuse seem to be at least to some extent lifelong.

All of this looks like a major indictment of Roman Christianity. And when you consider this rampant sexual abuse of children by priests, and the way the Catholic Church has mishandled its latest scandal by covering it up for as long as possible rather than at once protecting its children, and you add it to Roman Christianity’s many other abominable sins, you must be as horrified as I am horrified.  You can see why so many people are concluding now that the modern Christianity that was founded by the Roman Emperor Constantine and not by Jesus seems to be dying now what looks to be a well-deserved death. My goodness, I don’t think I ever really understood the following passage from Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount, and its precise application to the modern Roman Christian religion, until I saw how the Catholic hierarchy has been fussily protecting its own Precious, rather than truly serving the Lord Jesus and caring for Jesus’s children in this clergy sexual abuse scandal! Jesus ever so wisely said:

15 “Beware of the false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly are ravenous wolves. 16 You will know them by their fruits. Grapes are not gathered from thorn bushes nor figs from thistles, are they? 17 So every good tree bears good fruit, but the bad tree bears bad fruit. 18 A good tree cannot produce bad fruit, nor can a bad tree produce good fruit. 19 Every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire. 20 So then, you will know them by their fruits.

21 “Not everyone who says to Me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but he who does the will of My Father who is in heaven will enter. 22 Many will say to Me on that day, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in Your name, and in Your name cast out demons, and in Your name perform many miracles?’ 23 And then I will declare to them, ‘I never knew you; depart from Me, you who practice lawlessness!’ (MT 7:15-23)

Jesus never had much use for the clergymen of any religion. Now you and I can pretty clearly see why!

And He will raise you up on eagles’ wings, bear you on the breath of dawn,
Make you to shine like the sun! And hold you in the palm of His hand.

For to His angels He’s given a command:
To guard you in all of your ways. Upon their hands they will bear you up,
Lest you dash your foot against a stone.

And He will raise you up on eagles’ wings, bear you on the breath of dawn,
Make you to shine like the sun! And hold you in the palm of His hand.
And hold you, hold you in the palm of His hand.
– Michael Joncas, from “On Eagle’s Wings” (1977)

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